So, I was a little underwhelmed, initially, by Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff, and I still think the book is too alarmist for its own good. There are however a number of great observations of bad patterns in the digital experience, and I have a clear feeling that I'll be taking them with me when evaluating digital stuff in the future.
The first great use of the book since reading came on the news of Osama Bin Laden's death in an American attack. All of a sudden practically all digital media were afloat in a right or wrong-debate over the killing and the reactions to it. And this is where the following Rushkoff quote comes to mind

The digital realm is biased toward choice, because everything must be expressed in the terms of a discrete, yes-or-no, symbolic language. This, in turn, often forces choices on humans operating within the digital sphere. We must come to recognize the increased number of choices in our lives as largely a side effect of the digital; we always have the choice of making no choice at all.

That really hit home for me with the Osama story. I find myself completely unable to come up with a yes/no vote related to his death or the reaction to it. The courts should be our venue for justice. It's not likely the Americans could have succesfully driven up to the house and arrested Osama. I'm pretty sure the man himself would have preferred the ending he got to being paraded around as an American prize in the war on terror. There's maybe hundreds of other thoughts available in my head on hearing about the attack on Osama. I'd rather sit a while with those thoughts than join the chorus and "move past this" by passing judgment on 1) Osama, 2) the attack, 3) his death, 4) US-Pakistani politics, 5) jubilation in response to his death 6) the knee-jerk fear- and conspiracy theories already afloat 7) islam 8) USA - pick any number.

You can still propagandize with it. Pete Warden offers some important reflections on how data journalism will not - in and of itself - be a positive change to 'rational' or 'objective' journalism. There's no reason to think that data journalism isn't as amenable to biased storytelling as any other kind of journalism.

At the time of writing, the two Kickstarter projects Blue Like Jazz and Diaspora have raised almost exactly the same amount of money - about $200K. But take a look at the graph above. Do these projects look almost the same to you? Clearly they're not. Diaspora's donations are dominated by large numbers of small donations, and Blue Like Jazz is dominated by a few very large donations.
So much for power laws and treating people like statistics. Clearly huge cultural differences are hidden in the crowds and in the almost identical sum of the donations.
That being said, I would love for Kickstarter to generate sparklines similar to the graph above for all their projects. Gives you an immediate idea of the flavor of the community around a project. Is it a "mass project" or is it more a strong core with fans.

So Apple passed Microsoft in market cap the other day, and the really interesting thing about it was that it wasn't really bubbly stock market frenzy that did it. Apple is trading at a 21.50 P/E which isn't absurd, even if it is higher than Microsoft's.
Why is Microsoft stalling? Because they already won.
Some years back, before she was fired from HP, Carly Fiorina made a remark about the future of HP to the effect that since the market for PCs is pretty much completely saturated already, you can't really expect the tech sector to outgrow the economy as a whole. Companies are already spending all they can on IT. There's a soft ceiling somewhere, for how much of your revenue can go into tech spending and the corporation is approaching that level.
Microsoft gets all it's revenue from this no longer expanding slice of tech spending, so there is simply no way to grow beyond the few percent of general growth.
The deflationary power of technology can push these limits a little, but the key deflationary force these days isn't the PC as such but rather the internet and the networking of businesses.

Apple on the other hand has a lot of market share to gain in laptops and phones. The only saturated Apple-market is digital music players.

Valleywag has a helpful chart of the stormy relationship between progressives and Twitter. It reminds me of how blogging developed. At first it seemed to be some kind of monoculture, talking about particular things - and a lot about itself, trying to constitute the environment in the first place. And people thought that "blogger" was an identity; which of course no media can stay, if it is successful as a mass media.
Later we found out that political blogging is more like talk radio than anything else. Really good for fringes on both sides, energizing the troops - less good as an actual agora of public opinion.
Twitter also seemed to be owned by progressives; they built it after all. But of course that doesn't work with mass adoption and now the monoculture there is going the way of that of blogs.

Placebos are more efficient now than ever. Is this our belief taking over for rational thinking? Are we more tuned to simply believing in medicine - hence the increase in placebo efficiency.
This could be an interesting side story to other examples of a return to a more medieval or even pre-christian world without monotheism, where various stories assume a status of beliefs, becoming narratives outside our control.
I've written about hypercomplexity as a return to greek mythology before. No controlling narrative, no supreme being keeping the stories in check, but rather a fight of ideas, constantly overlapping the same territory, with competing claims.

Here's a problem with the global warming campaign I can't get out of my head.
Let's assume the dark outlook is right. Let's assume we act on it. Let's assume we stop the growth in energy expenditure per capita - maybe even cut it in half.
That's all fine - but the world's population is growing, so we're going to end up at the energy usage levels we dread; it's
just not going to be reached at 7 billion people but at 10 or 14 billion people.

So we're going to run into global warming-type problems in the end anyway. Will it really matter to the coastal populations of the world whether their homes are flooded because of 10 billion other people and not 7?

I doubt that very much.

Unless of course we can stop population growth. What is the only* known cure against insane population growth: Wealth. The richest countries consistently have the lovest population growth. Who uses the most energy? The richest. Of course there's the related problem that we can't invest in making the poor rich and childless if we're investing all our money in climate change.

The Google News/United Airlines sell off sounds more and more like an easily doable, virtually anonymous way to make a lot of money. If all it takes to promote an enormous drop in a highly liquid stock is a large number of clicks on an article in a regional newspaper's website, then the information ecosystem around the stock market is just too porous and dispersed for anyone to effectively control.

One wonders if the original website clicker later bought United stock.

The slow ongoing dissolution of the soul - a topic near and dear to classy.dk as part of our ongoing Hypercomplex Society coverage - was the subject of this Tom Wolfe essay some 11 years ago. The title of the essay, repurposed by The Guardian to describe more posthuman thinking by Francis Fukuyama six years ago.

There are plenty of non-nightmare futures where the dissolve remains the case.

Time has a proud history of naming people of questionable qualities man of the year but still it is somewhat disheartening (and laughable) that the magazine has carefully cleaned up the title to "person of the year" - while keeping to the tradition of awarding the title to non-democrats on the eve of their grandest moment of evil.
In other news: The Russian saber rattling, bombers violating the air space of Russia's westernized neighbors, has become almost routine in Scandinavia.

Unsurprising: Free culture contributes more to the economy and copyright heavy industries

OK, so the study is paid for by fair users, but still: A study shows that fair use provisions in copyright adds more to the american economy than the copyright industries owning the fairly used material.
Arguments from this could be made in various directions :"See, you're already benefiting enormously from fair use, is it really fair that you should be making most of the money from our material" could work as well as the prima facie conclusion that free culture is Good.
But everybody should know the value of fair use. Nobody has made more money from public domain culture than...Disney (think Little Mermaid, Snow White, Cinderella, Robin Hood - the list goes on) and now they would very much like to be the last company to be able to do this. That any politician considers this reasonable boggles the mind.

What a jackass - turning European anti-trust investigations into a nationalist problem. Monopolies, like that enjoyed by Microsoft, do not foster innovation. That should be abundantly clear from Microsoft's own track record. Still milking the same two old monopolies (Windows and Office), failing to change any of these products in any significant way. Fighting against open standards every step of the way. Also, Armey is a little late to the "We hate Old Europe"-attack isn't he? CNET has a bad history of running this kind of pro-monopoly puff. They were fightfing for monopoly lock in on the net nutrality issue also.

At the personal level, can I get a show of hands: How many of you at one time or another purchased stuff your company needed to procure so you could do the job and never asked for money back? Simply because the bitching with procurement just wasn't worth your time? I know I have many, many times.

* Note: I realize there's a distrust angle to this too, if you're a well trained cynic: It's just a sinister to ploy to limit the refund, because people will respond kindly and not ask for their money back when it comes out of the pocket of a nice personal person - but I'm going with trust on this one, personally.

Of course there could be real trouble. You can never know. But personally I consider this video a theater of fear. If the guy staging the whole thing was an artist he should win awards.
A man does something strange, spilling a substance on a subway station. And not just any substance, a brilliant MacGuffin - mercury. The paranoia quickly kicks in and is very rich and complete.
"This could be a dry run for a terrorist attack" is the lead off, but we soon get truly paranoid responses like "There's no good reason to bring mercury onto a subway platform" (as if we need one to do anything). The man ("white or middle eastern", of course) is wanted for "questioning for an unexplained activity in connection with a possible act of terror". (I sure hope I'll never have to explain my activities. it would make sense to want him for scaring people and disturbing traffic first). The TV-heads agree that "it's a good thing we have those cameras in there so we can get an idea of what's going on" (nothing really happened) but still "all these security systems are really starting to pay off" and the conclusion: "Are we being too careful? Experts say there's no such thing" (of course there is).

There's something wrong with how society mimics our own neural danger response. Society doesn't have a good mechanism to get rid of the fear again. No dreams, or forgetful filter to keep us sane. On the contrary, there's all kinds of subsystems of the hive mind with a strong interest in keeping the fear going.

Thomas Barnett calls the ongoing clash between Israel and Hisbollah a war instigated by Iran by proxy (Hisbollah) to defuse western intrest in Irans nuclear build up (or just general military build up). Barnett seems to dislike the current neocon government, but he comes from the same school of politics where recognizable players of a strategy game are moving recognizable pieces, strategic resources around on a global scale. Classic superpower thinking, only redone with a view towards the postwar scenarios. I liked one of his assertions elsewhere: There's just no way an increasingly connected 3 billion plus world of unwarring capitalists (remember India and China in this group) will continue to accept the Middle Eastern disarray for this entire century, so sooner or later the Middle East will change.

In other news from this kind of practical power politics there's a discussion on whether assymmetric warfara aka 4th generation warfare aka 4GW can win. The idea is that terrorists eem to be retargetting from symbolic warfare to effective warfare by hitting transportation infrastructure in urban centers instead of symbolic targets (which - even if the horror that resulted was truly horrific - the WTC bombings were). The argument continues that if terrorist can succesfully make urban concentration untenable by increasing the cost of urbanization (a terrorism tax), complex societies that rely on urban centers to achieve high economic output will suffer the most. I find it implausible that these complex societies wouldn't just turn up the complexity in response: e.g. move to wireless to have less communication infrastructure to hit and move to local power generation to have less power grid to hit. Interestingly the kind of challenges available for terrorists to exert are already exerted at a lesser scale by the market: Monopolies threaten the efficiency of network and WiMax grows to balance them out. The California energy crisis of the Enron years provoked an enormous interest in alternate means of power generation.

Isn't the best economic threat available to islamic terrorists extremely high oil prices? Won't the world will survive that too?

Paramount permits Trek-related fan projects, as long as the creators don't profit from them.

From this Wired story on Star Trek New Voyages. You may laugh at the trekkies, and you may find the result of their efforts somewhere between horrible and ridiculous (I personally think it looks like some of the between-sex-shots action from the porn in Boogie Nights), but the freedom to interact with the Star Trek universe that trekkies have had over the years should just be the default for everybody.

Lovely story on a ridiculous class action lawsuit against Netflix for not honoring obviously bogus marketing nonsense. The suit has been settled with the following consequences.

The sucker who sued got $2000 cash

All other Netflix customers unwittingly included in the lawsuit got a "settlement" comprising a marketing offer to get the first month free if they upgrade their Netflix package to a more expensive package.

The lawyers for afore mentioned sucker get paid $2,528,000. Yes. Two and a half million dollars. On the order of 1250 times more than they were able to secure their client.

Of course all the poor Netflix subscribers unwittingly included in the legal threat to scare the money out of Netflix in the first place get nothing at all - except an invitation to be at the receiving end of a Netflix upsale opportunity.

A while back I mentioned the ridiculous notion of 'the analog hole' - which is the "priacy problem" of reality it self. Sooner or later music and video passes through the ether towards our sensory inputs and along that route it can be intercepted and pirated. We all know this and it is why DRM will never work. However, ridiculous legislation is being proposed (not yet here in Europe, but that can only be a timing issue) to stop even this.
Idiots. Bloody dangerous idiots.

These stories are examples of the exact same thing: Once you start limiting free speech and once you start censoring under any disguise, you're censoring and limiting free speech. Period. Your intentions do not matter. Semantic drift will make them meaningless soon anyway. Someone will come up with some language that 'justifies' what ever it is they are trying to justify.

So, everybody's up on the Kanye West incident, a TV ad lib wherein West says that George Bush doesn't care about black people - with reference to the delayed help (and presidential appearance) to the Katrina disaster area.
At least now we know who his mother cares about: Barbara Bush is on tape saying that since most of the evacuees were underprivileged anyway, being a hurricane evacuee without a home, having suffered several days without food or water, possibly missing some of your relatives, sitting in a gigantic shelter with other people also deprived of everything, is actually a good deal.

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (she chuckled)--this is working very well for them.

Even as stopping the looting became a top priority, Tenet HealthCare Corp. asked authorities late Wednesday to help evacuate a fully functioning hospital in Gretna after a supply truck carrying food, water and medical supplies was held up at gunpoint.

I've written before about the bogosity of the currently accepted practise of computing loss to piracy as "total store price of total number of downloaded songs/films". Kottke sums up the bogosity in a brilliant footnote:

[1] Well, [Sony's loss is] $10.50 if you live in Manhattan. If you live in rural Wisconsin, you're only cheating Sony out of $8.00 or so. Well, until the movie comes out on pay-per-view and it costs $3.95. But then when the DVD comes out, Sony's loss will shoot back to $26.99. Twelve months after the DVD release, when Bewitched is available in a value two-pack with Anchorman, Sony will only be losing $6. Whew, must be hard to keep all those losses straight.

The disinformation in calling your latest DRM handicapping of content PlaysForSure.
MP3's also play for sure - without the handicap.
Co-opting good language to do bad is right at the top of the list of the reasons to hate big brands.

(The rape of public space with uniform, heavy handed corporate identity advertising is a close second)

Excellent terrorism notes. I like the title phrase on its own. I think it also speaks to some of the reasons software isn't always made usable. Developers admiring their problem. Admiration is harder to shed than just "problem solving mode".

Martha Stewart is set to do her own version of Donald Trump reality show "The Apprentice" but says she finds the signature "You're fired!" line 'harsh'.

"We are trying to come up with other ways to say it," she says. "For instance, if someone is from Idaho, I could say, `You're back in Boise for apple-picking time.'"

That's not only lame - that's a modern nonconfrontational management nightmare. It's the same kind of thinking that invented 'downsizing', 'unplanned sabatical', 'capability reduction' or whatever obfuscation by indirection is used instead of just saying straight out that you're firing people.

But it is also the wave of the future. This is the Big Mother one could worry we're currently heading for. Non-authoritarian totalitarianism.

[Update: It's No on patents. The directive has been thrown out by the Parliament]
[Update II: And it's London!]

Today is the day that the EU parlament votes on software patents as well as the day the IOC votes on the location of the 2012 Olympic Games.
My votes would be "No" (if possible, if not "Rocard") and "London".

So "small is the new big" we're told. That means it's probably time to read or reread Joel Spolsky's excellent comparison of two kinds of company - organic growth vs. forced growth you could call it.
It's no surprise that for the Web 2.0 wave, most of the companies we hear of are organic growth in some respect. It is only rarely visible for these companies that they have indeed broken free and created a 'space' all their own to dominate - for the web at large the 800 pound gorillas already roam the jungle.

Maybe the article would be better by acknowledging some successful transitions from organic to forced (the other way I think is close to impossible with anything like the original idea of the company intact). Google is, I think, an example. I think you could argue that Google started out organic, even launched product (in beta) in organic fashion, and only later switched the commercial engine of adwords into full growth gear.

I think it is reason enough to disallow software patents that the system is so extremely abusable and that the incentive to abuse the system is extremely high. The abuse: Throwing the book at the patent office. A massive landgrab in ideaspace. There's just no chance that patent offices anywhere will be able to properly evaluate all patent claims and momentum being what it is patents will most likely be awarded not discarded by default in lieu of a proper examination.
A good case in point is the XML serialization patent story - patent flip-flopping software behemoth Microsoft has done the equivalent of patenting the wheel in patenting, successfully, XML serialization of objects.
Not only is there plenty of prior art that will eventually lead to the patent being discarded, but at a deeper level, that's pretty much what XML is from a certain point of view.
The morale of the story is obvious: It doesn't really matter that the patent will hopefully be discarded at some point, the friction it has already created wil slow evolution of software. Absolutely no invention of anything was protected by the grant of this patent.

If it doesn't work all the time it just doesn't work: This week I was on a business trip to Romania and when I got home I found out that I had inadvertently made the entire trip carrying my swiss army knife. I have walked through 4 metal detectors without anyone noticing. At one of the detectors there was a huge container filled with all kinds of scissors and nail files that people forgot to take out of their hand luggage - but my knife has been with me in cabin luggage on all flights.

Control mechanisms are always abused when civil rights guards go out the window: What on earth does bittorrent have to do with Homeland Security? If this press report is correct that they were in fact involved, there are two possible explanations for the use of Homeland Security staff in taking down bittorrent trackers. Either "Homeland Security" is just a marketing exercise - and these are simply law enforcement professionals doing what they've been doing since before 911, or - the more chilling interpretation: Homeland Security is growing into a Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. Very 1984.

[UPDATE: Maybe the real story can be inferred from this report. Somethign along the lines of "We've built better surveilllance technology as part of the security effort and now we might as well use it for other purposes as well"]

The copyfight goes even more Orwellian: Microsoft wants to spread the meme that "intellectual property theft" is done by Thought Thieves. Glad you unintentionally brought up 1984, Bill - but you might want to read up on ThoughtCrime before you apply it to defend a policy that tries to limit what people can freely say.

The NY Times carries a story on the pompous, self righteous jerk who gloatingly takes credit for Microsoft's backing down from supporting an anti-discrimination bill.
He sounds like a completely horrible person and a perfect example of all that is wrong with conservative "god fearing" christianity, wielding his faith like a blunt weapon in a crusade that sounds more like it's about furthering himself than his faith.

If you can stomach the high density of numbers, here is solid evidence why Labour is absolutely certain to win the election in the form of Gordon Brown's budget presentation a 45 minute barrage of Labour policy performance. Numbers heavy, serious, strong political rhetoric with tremendous power.

[UPDATE: It just occured to me, that people might msiread my use of this quotation to equate nazi germany with modern day America. That is absolutely not the intention. We wouldn't have freedom in Europe without America. End of story. What I am saying is that systems of control tend to get out of hand, and that this observation applies in a broader context]

Everybody knows the famous "In Germany, the Nazis first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. [...] Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me." quote from Martin Niemöller. If you were thinking the american borders were only closed to arabs and people named David Nelson, think again. An english speaking Canadian blogger, Jeremy Wright, was recently turned back at the border - after being detained and strip searched. The reason for all this: Wright stating "blogger" as profession, and being somewhat snippy when asked questions. And here I thought Canadians and Americans crossed the border as freely as I go to Sweden. What's extra sad is that Wright has pulled his post on the matter, since he can't risk not being able to enter ever again.

Great blog post by Joe Kraus on how The Long Tail applies to software.
Ideas (music, search, books, films, software) are network phenomena, and the "natural" supply and demand laws for ideas should therefore be expected to follow network laws. The world wide web (and the presence of good long tail advertising models) reduces the friction in the model, making it feasible to market to the far end of the tail.
Patents increase the friction again, pulling us back into a mass market model for software. Good for the mass marketer, but bad for everone else: The market as a whole decreases in volume. And demand at the far end of the tail is not met by supply. This is yet another reason why the "patents increase innovation" argument is wrong. Not only does the continuous recycling of ideas that technology innovation relies on not take place, but entire microscopic markets for software aren't adressed by vendors.
This notion, that small aggressive competitors reach out to markets incumbents cannot ever hope to address is also completely consistent with the finding of "The Innovators Dilemma".

The memo is interesting besides the mention of patents. In 1991 Microsoft did not yet totally dominate desktop software. Much of the memo is taken up by discussion of the various kinds of infighting among the big software vendors - the relationship to IBM, Adobe's superiority in printing (this was back when printing was a difficulty) and so on. One of the worries back then was patents. Microsoft didn't own the desktop space yet, so the Microsoft outlook on patents was patents as threat not patents as opportunity. Now obviously the roles are reversed as is Microsoft's position on patents. No surprises there and one of the reasons to be wary of software patents.
In 1991 BillG recommended this memo on the particular problems for patents related to software.
Some of the problems listed are historical artifacts (e.g. poor patent database search facilities), but some still apply. I stress the objection related to the innovative proces described by Clayton Christensen. It's given a slightly different spin here:

In Software, Independent Reinvention Is Commonplace

A patent is an absolute monopoly; everyone is forbidden to use the patented process, even those who reinvent it independently. This policy implicitly assumes that inventions are rare and precious, since only in those circumstances is it beneficial.
The field of software is one of constant reinvention; as some people say, programmers throw away more "inventions" each week than other people develop in a year. And the comparative ease of designing large software systems makes it easy for many people to do work in the field. A programmer solves many problems in developing each program. These solutions are likely to be reinvented frequently as other programmers tackle similar problems.
The prevalence of independent reinvention negates the usual purpose of patents. Patents are intended to encourage inventions and, above all, the disclosure of inventions. If a technique will be reinvented frequently, there is no need to encourage more people to invent it; since some of the developers will choose to publish it (if publication is merited), there is no point in encouraging a particular inventor to publish it--not at the cost of inhibiting use of the technique.

No, its not about pending litigation - but according to Danish news broadcasts today (and apparantly tomorrows edition of Danish newspaper Børsen) Microsoft openly threatened to close down Microsoft Business Solutions development departments in Denmark, if the EU does not adopt the planned, but controversial, software patents directive. This is pure extortion. According to the news story, the Danish government plans to give in to this blatant politicising by Microsoft. Sickening if true (FFII has another Danish angle).
We may have to rely on Dutch democracy instead of our own.
Remember to just say no to software patents.

Please note that the current fight within the EU system between the council and the parliament is not even about adopting a software patent system, but only about stopping the kinds of ridiculous bland "no invention" patents that block invention instead of creating it. Details in the different wordings here.

It would seem Bill Gates thinks so. Completely oblivious to the very serious discussion on the serious impact on free speech commercial censorship via copyright control is having, Bill Gates calls anyone opposed to heavyhanded DRM 'communists'. I'm sure he also thinks all Europeans are communists, if for no other reason then for maintaining anti-trust lawsuits against Microsoft.
Sounds like he's ready to run for office as yet another republican scaremonger next to Arnold 'Girlie Men' Schwarzenegger and Dick 'why don't you go F*** yourself' Cheney and let's not forget FCC chairmain Michael 'Wardrobe Incident' Powell.

[UPDATE, cognitive typo fixed]
In offline comments it was suggested that the actions of the FCC (introduction of broad censorship including crackdowns on Howard Stern and others on the pretense of the superbowl 'wardrobe incident') were not on the same scale as these other attacks on basic freedoms. I think it is just as bad. Free speech is also for swearing assholes, furthermore, the lines between form and content are blurry. Form, including obscenities, occasionally speaks volumes. One person's moral complaints is another person's political message.

Turns out there's no need for me to keep a compendium of ridiculous lawsuits. It's already done excellentely at Overlawyered.
Its mainly about the American legal system, but the current most recent story is actually about the chilling effects of anti-terror legislation in the UK. In this case a man being randomly searched, then randomly arrested for having a swiss army knife in his briefcase. Random searches in a western democracy in peace time - that's just great. 1984 really is not very far off. It was presented to the arrested man as "a training exercise", but here was no exercise about his subsequent arrest.

I thought the ones I mentioned recently were good, but this lawsuit beats them all: Restaurant chain Benihana is being sued for their responsibility in the death of one Jerry Colaitis. He died because of an infection that contracted after surgery he had to correct previous surgery that he had to correct a dislocation of two of the vertebrae in his neck. He allegedly dislocated his neck, because a chef at a Benihana restaurant threw a piece of shrimp at him, so now the family is, obviously, suing the restaurant.
It's almost like a childrens rhyme:

This is the ambulance chaser,
who chased the ambulance,
that carried the man,
that carried the infection,
that was contracted during surgery,
that was to correct surgery,
that was to correct a dislocation of the neck,
that swerved to avoid the shrimp,
that was thrown by the chef,
that works at the restaurant,
that is owned by Benihana Inc.

A must read open letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1 - by the reporter holding the camera in Falluja that taped a marine shooting, what seemed to be an unarmed non-aggresive wounded man. As usual the story is a lot more complicated than what gets reported on TV.

Jon Udell points to an excellent infographic from The New York Times (I can't find it there though)
It combines margin of victory (width of columns), electoral collage vote results (each block a state, height indicates number of votes), and shifts in victory (darker colours) for American presidential elections from 1940 to 2000. Blue means democrat and red republican as usual. Udell combined the different images into a Flash movie. Living history.

Turns out electoral-vote.com is the brain child of Andrew Tanenbaum, of Minix and textbook fame and "Linux vs. Minix"-flame notoriety. I'm sure this information has been in plain sight all the time, but I didn't notice until I saw the fact on Tim Bray's weblog.

A collection of news clips and film clips. A reaction to the infamous swiftboat veterans for truth, and a pro-Kerry entry at the end of the American presidential election campaign. I dislike the inclusion of 9/11 - arguably some of the most over the top propagande of the election - but this TV-clip (Quicktime) from the floor of the House of Representatives is power rhetoric.

Another of the Pop!Tech talks at the amazing ITConversations website is Thomas Barnett's presentation on American security policy in a globalized world. The most interesting thing about this presentation is that you can hear the no nonsense tough talk delivery one assumes is required in a military environment.
For his actual message on new international strategies go to his website.

This lack of proportion in the Cornyn-Feinstein anti-piracy bill - and the fact that it still was passed through the Senate - boggles the mind. Five years in prison for filming in a movie theater? This is a copyright war nuclear weapon that just got fired. But of course it was already fired months ago, only in California. While not quite as bad as the proposals to make it legal for record and movie companies to hack back vigilante style, it's pretty bad as it is.
Meanwhile were still waiting for reasonable computations of "losses" in the file sharing lawsuits.

This is just Sad news. A mindnumbingly simple political quiz was given to a lot of people and viewers of Jon Stewart's Daily Show news satire came out on top.
Good job for Stewart - although you would obviously have to be interested in these things to even consider watching his show, which gives some bias.
I think it's more sad that people on average scored only less than 50% correct on a really simple test (If you can figure out who favours tax cuts, who favours gun control, and who favours labor unions you're well on your way to acing the test).

An overlooked point from the much talked about long tail feature in the most recent edition of Wired is that it is in fact only Amazon that makes more money from "not in physical stores" inventory. But the good question is whether Amazon in fact created that phenomenon by aggresively pursuing a big catalog.
As far as I know Amazon publishes quite simply everything available in print in English. Even a lot of stuff not in print is available second hand through Amazon's interface. In contrast, the Netflix 25000 film catalog is only 8 times that of a typical Blockbuster according to the article; where Amazon has 18 times the catalog of a typical Barnes & Noble. Is Netflix offering everything that is available at 25000? That seems like a low number (Hitchcock made 50 films, do you mean to tell me there's only 500 times as many in total?).
Same thing with Rhapsody's 735000 song catalog. At at 19 multiplier against Wal-Mart they seem to have a lot, but is Wal-Mart who you want to compare yourself to in music retail? I doubt very much that 735000 songs is really a very full catalog. I have about 1000 albums on tape, disc and vinyl, so my collection is maybe on the order of 10000 songs. I would expect even a half way decent record shop to have at least ten times that number, possibly more, and someone offering a full catalog to have several million tracks, just in popular music (The Rolling Stones catalog is over 300 songs. Do you mean to tell me there's only 2000 times as much music as that put out by The Stones?).
Isn't Rhapsody and Netflix in fact failing right now at capitalizing on the law of the long tail?

Greed got in the way of good manners, when the original developer for The .NET port of the Lucene indexer pulled the original sourceforge project, and started marketing his open source software as a closed source commercial product!
It's one thing if he had actually come up with an independent idea and just regretted his open source licence, but he's just ripping off the (free) work of others. What an asshole. He even had the poor taste of leaving advertising for his commercial rip off at the original sourceforge project page (Google Lucene.Net - I'm not going to add Google juice). Thankfully this didn't go down quietly - the open source project is back as another sourceforge project in less greedy hands.

Upstreaming apparently means moving up the food chain. Make yourself more valuable, specialize even further. Extend. Grow. It's not quite the same thing as an old school career track - it's more like a creative world analogou of old school career planning.

TiVohas agreed to media use restrictions dictated by broadcasters. So don't but that TiVo yet. The notion that I would want broadcasters to control my use of a device I specifically purchased to take personal control of when and how I consume broadcast media is absurd.
Thank god for the DIY or no-brand Taiwanese/Chinese alternatives to this kind of commercial control.

Max Ochoa, associate general counsel of San Jose-based TiVo, said consumers won't be ambushed by the copy restrictions.

That's just spin. Of course this is an ambush on your freedom to act in any way you want with products you have purchased and put in the privacy of your home.
It is also a reminder why we shouldn't trust the new model of purchasing everything on a service basis. Unless "Don't be evil" becomes law for companies offering such services, we're much better of by moving intelligence and storage to the edges where it can't be controlled.
This by the way is the point of Steve Mann's book Cyborg and the ideology behind his wearable computing and sousveillance projects. Wearable tech is the ultimate edge network. Mann's book quite brilliantly explains how fairer, democracy minded, technology depends on the edge.

Predictably, Fahrenheit 9/11 has taken a lot of fire because it is partisan propaganda. Michael Moore is being described as a money grabbing, left wing liar. I don't like propaganda in any way shape or form, so while I think George W. Bush is the worst president in my lifetime (possibly more corrupt than the other candidate Nixon, certainly more incompetent) I'm not particularly happy that the fight against Bush has to be fought like this. I'm happy we don't have completely frivolous political messages dominating elections in Denmark.
Still, when you look at a backlash like this and compare F9/11 to some of the political advertising that is allowed to air, Moore is a model for balanced, politically centered messages. Lisa Rein points to the story of how an attack ad, calling John Kerry's decorated Vietnam history bogus is basically complete fiction by a right wing group. The ad shows testimonials by people who say they served with Kerry and that his war record wasn't that great after all, but on closer inspection it turns out that none of the people really did serve with Kerry at all. The story was debunked on The Daily Show. Rein has the clip.
Obviously Bush has deniability wrt. to this group; he didn't instruct them to lie, but the lie serves his purpose so its not like he's complaining either. In another clip, linked to here, Bill Clinton relates the story of how the same group called white voters during the 2000 republican primaries to let people know that John McCain had a black child. The idea was to appeal to the inner racist of the voters of course, but it just turns your stomach that this kind of thing is allowed to go on. And btw. that black child was a girl adopted from Bangladesh, so not that it matters, but they even got their racial stereotypes wrong.
Michael Moores propaganda is pretty harsh, but I think it is pretty consistent that the outright lies and the pure hate ads are all right wing. Why would any reasonable person vote for a party that, if not exactly condones, then half silently accepts the benefits of this kind of shameful campaigning.

If it's true that Apple is considering suing RealNetworks for making an iPod compatible online music service as reported here then I'm so not getting an iPod. It's ironic and disheartening that the open source dependent, monopoly squeezed PC maker Apple is using this kind of heavyhanded IP-rights tactic in the digital player market.

The main interest in the 9/11 commision report (downloads here) is whether or not it will help John Kerry beat Bush in the upcoming elections, but it's no wonder that CNN isn't leading with the political story but with the real life drama of the passengers who fought back.
It's a dramatic story and shows what an absolute nightmare september 11 was on board that plane. Once the passengers attacked the hijackers, the hijackers started to roll the plane first and when that proved inefficent abruptly diving and climbing. The cabin must have been a complete mess. Furthermore - the pilots actually received a warning before the hijackers attacked the cockpit, it was just such an unexpected warning that the pilots asked for confirmation. A lot could have been different with locked, steel reinforced cockpit doors and with the warning being taken seriously. But at the time, the content of the warning was just too unimaginable to be accepted at face value without double checking.

What is a little harder to estimate is the political dynamite. Danish newspapers carried a list of some 10 early indications that something was afoot where the same names cropped up again and again, but I have to say that I believe very much that this is one of thoses cases with 20/20 hindsight. I have no idea how many names and people the CIA, FBI, and NSA combined are trying to keep taps on, but it must be thousands.
It's no simple task to make sure that all the information about any specific person or name gets collated and accumulated in one place, and once it does you have to recognize what level of threat there is.
Secondly, let's assume the engineering effort of large scale monitoring of intelligence targets can be solved, then there is the matter of public oversight. It's not a very pleasing alternative to have >100K staff controlloing the whereabouts of millions of people on a daily basis. There has to be balance as well.

Microsoft plans to pay out $75 Billion to shareholders over a 4 year period in the form of dividends and stock buy backs. That is a staggering amount of money for one company to sit on. Its comparable to the entire public sector budget of Denmark for a year. While Denmark is a small country, it is also a rich country and we have an enormous public sector.
To get another, non-inflation adjusted, perspective on that figure: The Marshall Plan paid out $15 Billion to resurrect Europe after the damages of WW2.
15 $Billion is also approximately the US foreign aid budget by the way, and speaking of aid - Bill Gates has announced that his portion of the dividend payouts, some $3 Billion, will go into his foundation.

Heck, just recently, I was shopping in Bath, England, and made a large purchase in an antiquarian bookshop. Fifteen minutes later, I was four buildings down the street in a second bookshop, tried to make another purchase, and had my card rejected. Meanwhile, back in California, my wife was receiving a call, wondering if the card had been stolen. "Why would someone halfway around the world be spending so much on books?" they wanted to know.

Good find by David Weinberger - a new CMP magazine called Managing Offshore devoted entirely to speeding along your outsourcing and/or offshoring to India and other places.
With product news of new contractors for call centers, software development or business processing as well as helpful tips on multicultural management, legal problems of accountability and security and also we learn some good biz speak, namely "captive operations", meaning those you have to actually run yourself and cannot or will not outsource. As one of Weinberger's commenters points out:

Ah, pleased to know I'm known in the trade as a captive worker because I work directly for my employer... I'd only just recently got used to being referred to as "a resource" rather than "a person".

...they will stoop to to fence culture with copyrights. Latest reminder of this sad fact is a new bill being proposed that tries to characterize P2P software makers (and presumably streaming media player makers by extension) as child abusers. No, it's not a joke. Here's how it works:
The bill is called the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act and it is backed by some choice guilt by association rhetoric:

“It is illegal and immoral to induce or encourage children to commit crimes,” said Hatch.

“Tragically, some corporations now seem to think that they can legally profit by inducing children to steal,” said Hatch. “Some think they can legally lure children into breaking the law with false promises of ‘free music.’”

Almighty god! - P2P is turning our kids into law breaking crazies. Listening to all that vulgar rock'nroll music will turn them on to sex, alchol and drugs!

A few weeks ago Cory Doctorow spoke at Microsoft about DRM (full talk here) and recently David Weinberger did too, although he was asked there for different reasons. I like the following answer to a question on what's wrong with digital rights management and aggresvie use based copyright control:

When it comes to creative works, we are not "consumers," and we are not users. Rather we appropriate creative works, that is, we make them our own. We apply them to our own context. We get them somewhat right or entirely wrong. They become part of us. That's how how we learn and how culture changes. But that means that creators should lose control of their works as quickly as possible. [...] A pay-per-use system and allowing artists to control their works much past launching them into the world will kill culture. Further, since publishing creates the public [a point I'd made earlier], building an infrastructure designed to allow that type of control will damage the new public of the Web as well as cripple culture. It's a really really really bad idea, so don't do it.

Amen to both points (the one of co-creation and the one on the public). In fact I made the exact same point almost exactly 2 years ago:

[T]he act of comprehension of any text or other intellectual content, is in fact a long running, never ending and many faceted process. In the simplest form [of DRM/use based licensing], you would skirt an issue such as this, and go with something simple like "hours of direct personal exposure to content via some digital device". That works for simple kinds of use [listening to a record], but not for complicated use [e.g. software]. And is should be clear from endless "fair use" discussions that content owners are very aware of the presence of ideas made available in their content in later acts of expression.

A wild farfetched guess would be that as we digitize our personal space more and more, expression will be carried to a greater and greater extent over digital devices, so that the act of thought is actually external, published and visible (witness the weblog phenomenon). In such a world, the notion that reference is use becomes quite oppresive.

Perhaps Hastert or his spokesperson needs to read op on their Montesquieu and the importance for democracy of the Separation of Powers. The complete lack of basic respect for democracy of the current American government is one of those problems that keeps one up sleepless. Please, Americans, vote for Kerry, not Bush.

The following story seems bonafide, although given the content one has to be on the lookout for any manipulation: Some ingenious deciphering is going on of a photo of handwritten talking points for George W. Bush from a cabinet meeting. The notes on the other hand are less than ingenious, being the same key points hammered upon on every occasion, still without any depth of argument.
Not that we didn't know from "The West Wing", but the talking order of press reporters after a meeting is no conincidence either. Bush has a list of reporters to allow questions from in the order in which they are to be prompted to ask.
It's easy to joke about the simplicity of the messages but on the other hand if one has ever worked in any kind of organization trying to maintain a long term goal in spite of endliss lists of little problems one will recognize the importance of returning to the original message all the time.

One of the most admirable qualities of the USA and its tremendous military force is that there is not a trace of doubt that the US military is under firm democratic control. The army acts because it is asked to act by elected officials. There simply is no history to back any suspicion that it should be any other way. This is an essential difference between America and any other major aggresive military power the world has known in the last couple of decades.
On the other hand this indicates quite clearly to me that is Ricardo Sanchez approved the use of turture at Abu Ghraib, as reported by The Washington Post, he was told to do so by somebody even higher up in the Bush administration even if there is no paper trail (yet).

I simply don't get how a situation like the Atom standardization stalemate (original info linked here) is at all possible. While it sounds reasonable enough to debate whether a body of standards will be consistent if developed by different standards bodies, the current situation sounds too much like organizational turf war to me. In fact it sounds like corporate infighting, only the actors are standards bodies (one or more of the organizations might object to this term, being usually applied to expensive government run organizations).
What makes it absurd is the simple fact that the people seeking to standardize Atom have expressed no desire to work with the W3C. For all I care they could start up the Atom Standardization Organization, I am - and I think most everybody else is as well - mostly interested in seeing the actual specs solidify to everybodys satisfaction. I don't see how the W3C is really helping that at the moment, and I don't see why they would want to hinder that process.
The most important argument seems to be that the W3C has a better process for dealing with IP rights issues. The right way is to waive any rights on the work done of course but at the current medieval stage in the history of ideas - where knowlegde may be forbidden as it was in the dark ages - that seems out the question maybe.

Here's a brilliant example of too slick corporate communication:
The website of the Coca-Cola company states in a FAQ entry that "cocaine has never been an added ingredient for Coca-Cola". While that's technically true Coke did contain cocaine originally because it was a natural part of the coca leaf extract used to make Coca-Cola. It wasn't added it was already there.Snopes has the story. The cocaine was only present in small amounts, but it was there. The amount of coca extract present in Coca-Cola was cut back in 1891 only a few years after the product was first invented, but trace amounts of cocaine remained until it was completely eliminated in 1929.

Hidden in this Rushkoff rant on the closing of America the permanent loss of liberty and values due to an opportunistic government without any hint of a basic respect for liberty of anybody of a differing opinion (see below for details) is a great term that I will immediately start using, instead of the tired terms flack, pr-person, spin doctor, etc. he simply calls the prefessionals of the rhetoric business influence professionals. That has just the right bland yet ominous connotations it needs to have to describe the sad state of politics and other systems of influence.

As an example I still can't understand at all how Scoble sleeps at night. Having an organisation that is conversationally open is good. Working for that organisation and using, seemingly without any reservations, your own personal identity to market the organization is not.

Here's a partial shortlist of suspecious looking actions or rhetoric by the current administration and its cronies. What's interesting about the list is how total it is. It's not just anti-terrorism. It's everything.

The Florida election

Total Information Awareness

Secret no-fly lists

"Enemy combatants"

Supreme court upholding right to secret arrest without court hearing

Abu Ghraib

"They absolutely positively have weapons of mass destruction"

Senior Govt. officials simply not making themselves available to the press

The FCC response to The Nipple Incident

The proposed constitutional amendments to make homosexual marriage unconstitutional

Quiet acceptance of RIAA wall to wall lawsuits

The monopoly enhancing deregulation of newsmedia

Using the Secret Service to make a joke of the right to free assembly (be keeping protestes at a media-wise convenient distance from the president)

"Freedom fries" (the total outrage against France combined with the "They absolutely positively have weapons of mass destruction" lie is as undermining of America's well earned standing as defender of freedom as the systematic torture in Abu Ghraib)

Approx 1 hour ago the EU grew by more than 10% population wise as 10 new countries entered the EU. The majority of the new EUropeans are Polish. The EU zone now holds a staggering 450 million people who speak more than 20 different languages. Eastern Europe is "The India of Western Europe" - low wage, high education, understandable culture, good language skills. The fear Americans have this season of outsourcing to India is mirrored in Denmark and elsewhere by fear of an invasion of Polish workers undercutting the standard of living in Denmark.
Here at classy.dk we welcome our new relatives - this extension of the EU is the final nail in the coffin of the protectionist fears that were the sole weapon of the left wing anti-EU oposition through the 90s. There's a nationalist right wing opposition also - but that's another matter.

American military sources are confident in their military control of Iraq but unsure about the political future as reported in the NYTimes referenced on defencetech:

"We can beat these guys, and we're proving our resolve," one officer tells the paper. "But unless the political side keeps up, we'll have to do it again after July 1 and maybe in September and again next year and again and again."

Which is why the arguments for the war before the war had to be very convincing. Which they weren't. Nobody was sad to see Saddam fall, but the war in Iraq was wrong because of how it was justified with known 'untruths', because of how it was exploited after the war and because nobody thought about the present situation.

Reports are coming in that the Bush administration will no longer protect homosexuals from discrimination in the workplace (getting fired). This right after watching a heated and interesting debat over whether (lack of) democracy in and of itself would have been a sufficient reason to fight the war in Iraq.
Like David Weinberger (from whom I stole the link) I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the details. But the story that offices within the Bush Administration is looking into the Legal Interpretation of Discrimination Statutes is correct.

How is it possible, even thinkable, that Bill Clinton's unwillingness to answer completely unjustified questions about his sexlife (yes I know he was giving testimoy at the time) can cause him years of political trouble, turning him into a lame duck president for a considerable time, whereas a consistent rhetoric of lies from all senior members of George Bush's staff for over a year only threatens to cost Bush the election. I realize George Lakoff has an explanation but I still can't comprehend how half a nation could be so happy to close its eyes on so obvious, consistent and wide ranging deception.
There is no scale to lies apparently. The importance of the lie does not scale with the consequences of it.

At the same time these people are quickly stealing free speech - no courts involved - Doc Searls follows this scandal closely and eloquently.

The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation is in charge of an enormous cross ministerial effort to define a coherent plan for digitizing the rather large Danish public sector. This is the true definition of programming in the large: thousands and thousands of jobs are being redefined as part of this effort since a digitized public sector is a chenged public sector. Obviously no central office could possibly hope to design the entire framework for this kind of system with any level of detail but nonetheless the strategy is being defined and documents on it have been published.

The top down focus is wisely on document standards, security standards and openness (as in the ability to review public data on yourself). The large consultancies must be salivating.

I realize my track record is less than perfect - I like conspiracy theories only a little less than the next guy - but isn't guilt by association a particularly right wing tactic these days. Obviously in the 70s everybody was throwing guilt around like it was in infinite supply but these days all the major guilt trips are orchestrated by conservative forces. Let's (partially) list some popular guilt by association tactics:

All of the above are examples of something linked to pure evil by association. In the topmost case there is actual evil also - but that does not make the guilt by association strategy politcally defensible.
Maybe its just the American bias of the internet but I find that all of these issues - many of which are really American interior politics - are increasingly important for Europeans as well because they are so clearly attempts at turning all politics into values, and because the goverment of the world's only superpower is willing to act on and support any of these cases with complete disregard for whether these shallow arguments will prove viable in the long term. In all of the above cases the value based attack on the opposition are simply performed to get something done today with complete disregard for how that may be written up in future history books. One has to assume the republican administration is betting that the victor will get to write those history books.

What are the European equivalents? For IP rights we have the exact same issues, but for most of the other issues we have nothing on the same scale going on. I think it is safe to say that pan-europaeism is the reason for that: Through the EU systems the various European governments are under the scrutiny of the the other governments and the EU itself is under the scrutiny by all the governments. That makes for indecisive government with unclear democratic autority at its worst but it also makes for very public disagreements and therefore a very strong indirect public control.

Eric S. Raymond has published a leaked SCO memo describing a recent investment in SCO as hidden Microsoft funding of the Linux IP rights lawsuit. The memo has been confirmed as authentic according to ESR's website - but obviously SCO's people are nuw busy disputing the accuracy of the information despite acknowledging the memo. It seems entrely implausible that a discussion as given in the letter - a consultant argues over what fee he should earn for bringing in the Microsoft money - would go on at all if nobody at SCO thinks this is the service the consultant has provided.

This is just appalling if true. A 100 mio$ exercise in abusing the legal system with bogus lawsuits against the opposition. In fact this is so bad that I'm surprised SCO and MS is not controlling this in a different way through the argument along the lines of "We at MS share the belief held by SCO that open source is a threat to the American way of life so we're offering our economic assistance to beleaguered SCO so they can fight the unamerican, property invading behemoth that is IBM". We've certainly heard a lot about those teenage commie Chinese renegade, open source slackers/hackers you're entrusting your vital business information to when you use open source software.

Meanwhile SCO has made no progress in making their complaint against IBM seem reasonable. In fact, in an extremely boring article on Groklaw a guy named Warren Toomey chronicles the history of a few of the files SCO claims has been copied verbatim to ther real roots. The probable root turns out to be Minix header files. Linux famously based Linux on Minix and got into a much celebrated flamewar with Minix creator Andy Tanenbaum on the relative merits of the two operating systems. Even more damaging to the SCO case is Toomey's documentation that copying from the UNIX source files in question was widespread as early as 1978 making the notion that IBM recently and illegally contributed the contents to Linux seem even more bogus.

The EFF's campaign for radio style licensing terms for file sharing continoues. The EFF proposes a license form where a collection agency charges a resonable use-based for music (or other copyrighted) file sharing and in return file sharers get freedom to download and share without risk of litigation.

Perhaps we should simply start a collection in escrow and then see if we can find a record company to take the bait, err.. money.

Here's a new conspiracy theory for you:American 20$ bills now contain RFID tags. The site sourcing the story triggers all conspiracy theory alerts and the exploive evidence given for the presence of the Radio Frequency Identifier is apparently phony: There's a metal strip in the 20$ bill approximately at the explosion point [According to the accompanying slashdot thread this may not even be true - I really wouldn't know - it's been a while since I had a 20$ bill in my possession being a Dane, living in Europe and all]

BUT, the government is considering the idea.
I am still unsure as to whether RFID tags are produced completely unique or just unique per product, but as far as I can recall theres a 96 bit identifier space so completely unique tags are certainly possible in theory. That of course means that all 20$ bills would then be "marked bills" traceable forever. Bad news for bank robbers - and for the first unsuspecting perfectly lawabiding citizen tracked for no reason through this new tracking mechanism.

The American Bar Association is pro-monopoly it would seem, since they have appointed Microsoft associate general counsel Richard J. Wallis chairman of an antitrust panel. Nonsurprisingly the panel is organizing opposition to aggresive enforcement of antitrust law.

Obviously the proposal wont fly now it it's a news story, but that doesn't make the proposal to ban "evolution" from school books in Georgia because of pressure from creationist idiots any less of a landmark. "It fits into a pattern" of right wing backlashes against sanity.

If you're in the United States as a non U.S. Citizen you no longer have any human rights.
Bruce Schneier, as always, has the right take on this. Total control does not prevent serious crime it's just a slippery slope away from democracy and freedom.
The Bush administration has got to go. This is getting scarier and scarier. It is extremely disconcerting to have an ally that at the same time is run by protectionist, closed mind, right wing assholes and want international backing to support its policies. There's just no way these two sentiments add up.

Clay Shirky comments on the remarkable quick decline in popularity of the Dean campaign in the primaries. His asks the interesting question whether the intensity of the believers in the highly praised Digital Dean Campaign actually turned non-believers off Dean. There's that, and then there's the framing phenomenon I wrote of earlier.

Was Howard Dean the victim, and John Kerry the beneficiary, of the phenomenon of psychological framing as explained in this product pricing example?
In a political context the framing would go like this: Through his early lead and absurd amounts of press coverage of Deans "acerbic" rhetoric, Dean has established a boundary of the reasonable that makes Kerry's Bush bashing seem like solid middle ground? If that is the case then Dean should be commended for moving the middle ground off the usual "We all cut taxes and we all support the troops, believe in god and stay silent on abortien" middle ground driven by the christian right in another fine exercise of psychological framing.

Starting Jan. 1, toting a camcorder into a movie theater will be a crime in California. Under the law, moviegoers who see a person with a camcorder in a theater may make a citizen's arrest. Those convicted could spend a maximum of a year in jail and be fined up to $2,500.

Have Californian legislators lost their minds? Sure, the movie industry and music industry is important in California, but come on. First of all, the price (in loss of personal freedom) paid through measures like this far outweigh the damage of copying. Secondly, the legislation will most likely not work.
Meanwhile, it becomes more and more clear that the current strategies of MPAA and RIAA to protect their property is working to their disadvantage. The strategy seems to be to make "One last stand" at the curren tmedia formats - adding copy control and watermarking to CDs and DVDs - but these formats are beginning to be obsoleted by networked storage and new devices like MP3 players and new networked 'entertainment centers' like this and this.
Soon an argument for pirating your music is that you only need the CD or DVD as proof of purchase. You never use the information on the disk for anything because it is just not compatible with your media playback devices.

That innovation is a great destructor of value is nothing new. The telegraph was famously obsoleted by telephones and railways (at least for personal transport) by cars and planes. By not adapting their products to new technology the movie and music industries are building another exampe of this. It is not a given, nor should be a requirement, that new technology supports old businessmodels. Television makes an interesting example: Suppose media owners of the time had tried a use based pricing scheme. Broadcast television made use based pricing unmanageble and use based rights regulation unenforceable. Insted the advertising model was invented, and that model was a perfect match for broadcast television. Televison was not built on the businessmodel of cinema or live performance and it would have been a complete failure if it had. The fact that the new businessmodel has been such a success may lead one to forget that television did destroy a lot of businesses, namely movie theaters. I'm sure one can find complaints from disgruntled theater owners at the time, that television was killing their industry, that sound almost similar to the current complaints about internet based media devices.

Note how the telecom regulation story and the Sims Online story provide nice counterpoint to one another. One suggests we need government because even without governemt there will be power, and it is better to have power of the people, for the people, by the people. The other story however indicates that the power that will be is the problem in and of itself, whether it is corporate power og government power. Nothing worthwhile is easy.

Publicized in many places, a judge has ordered SCO to turn over the code they claim IBM has violated rights to, as reported on CNET. What I hadn't seen was that SCO has actually produced the documentation on 1 million sheets of paper in a ridiculous delaying tactic. If you needed convincing that SCO is only in this game to extract money by strong arming nervous linux users, this ought to do it.
As pointed out by one commenter on Dan Gillmor's blog IBM resorted to the same tactics back in 1975, producing a staggering 41 linear feet of documents. By my count the SCO source should take up considerably more space than that (closer to 300 linear feet of paper)

Some notes on JOHO the Blog concerning the regulation of Voice over IP, as telephony is set to disappear completely as an independent infrastructure. Kevin Werbach is absolutely right in saying:

...the real issue is the transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a subset of the Internet. That means treating voice as an application that can run on any platform, not as the platform itself. The regulatory status of VOIP is just the tip of the iceberg.

The reflex "But how do we control this" seems completely out of place when viewing VoIP from an Internet perspective. If heavyhanded regulation is implemented, the arms race of P2P (in the guise of filesharing) against the music industry will be duplicated as an arms race of P2P (in the guise of voice messaging) against governments. The opportunities to circumvent VoIP regulation are simply too many for any local and fair regulation to be possible, and I frankly don't see how governments can win and serve the interests of their citizens at the same time:
If wiretap provisions were extended to the IP network of the internet, would public access points at libraries and schools be shut down? What about access through company networks. Cryptography enables information hiding on so may levels that it seems absurd to legislate other than through a complete ban.

Obviously my media selection is biased. But I can't seem to recall a similar depth and breadth of criticism being waged on the current Bush's father when he was president as one can find now. It's not just micropublishing:

An anti-Bush documentary was on display recently in an orchestrated 2600 screen "open home viewing". It has sold quite well also

Al Franken's and Michael Moore's recent anti-Bush books have been consistent Amazon.com bestsellers for a longish time

There is that Dean phenomenon after all, bloggers, fundraisers and all

Al Gore goes left by endorsing Howard Dean in the primaries.
A presidential race with a non-apologetic democrat, proud of democratic values would be at least be interesting if not close. What's also interesting is whether or not (i think it was) Stewart Brand's prediction that the discontent with the current political climate is deep enough that the presidential election will be won by the "I'm not G.W. Bush" candiate will hold true. If anybody needs it, it's probably Dean.

It is a rather natural conclusion: As the tech sector's GDP share of economic activity approaches a "soft limit" (the only known hard limit is 100%), the growth in the tech sector will start to slow to a level comparable to general levels of growth. Technology of course induces growth in other sectors but not as much growth as technology has been able to create for itself, so the final result is a long term irreversible slowdown in the tech sector. This seems to have been a dominant meme of 2003.
Carly Fiorina commented on that at the beginning of this interview (streaming video) and in other media. Before they closed down The Red Herring carried this piece on Moore's law and how the economics of the law may start to slow down the technological promise of the law.

How on earth can a voting machine manufacturer think it is acceptable to be a strong supporter of a political party. The CEO of much criticized voting machine manufacturer Diebold plants foot in mouth.

Like I said just a little while ago, blacklist are evil no matter what reason you had for having them. Here's a case in point: Censorware generally censors blogs. That's a lot to miss to stay porn free. In fact I think you could argue that censoring technology this broad shouldn't even be legal - certainly not for any public system. That smacks a little too much of government censorship to be acceptable. Of course the tendency is to go the other way - since public systems (e.g. school computer rooms) need to fight complaint from a varied group of conservatives and the generally anxious.

The DMCA is not the only law put forward recently that is too broad and is being misused because of that. John Allen Muhammad 'The Washington Sniper' has been found guilty of 'terrorism'. While his crime was terrible and he did, in a broad sense, terrorize the public, I think terrorism has to be understood as something saner (hence more dangerous), more organized and more 'intentful'. A lone gunman is hardly ever a terrorist, and to qualify he would have to fit into a broader picture of threats than this outrageous series of murders.
Muhammad may end up being convicted of the crimes feared while he was still on the loose (namely organized domestic terrorism) instead of the crimes he committed (a series of meaningless murders).

I still hope that we will one day remember the last few years as "The Prohibition". This time it is ideas and knowledge sharing that is outlawed and not alcolhol - which of course makes this prohibition a lot nastier than the last one. But there are so many similarities. The law is patently absurd (pun intended) completely out of step with reality and everybody is violating the law all the time.

I must not be reading my newspapers properly, because I missed the story of Donald Rumsfeld's leaked memo of doubt. Good coverage here. I remember exactly one TV debate where somebody admitted doubt as to what was the right thing to do aginst the threat of militant islam, but that was just a Danish media pundit, and it was pre-Iraq. It's long gone now. So it is refreshing to see any kind of doubt or questioning of standard operating procedure - even if the thinking is mainly about how to organize the military and not whether to organize the military. Of course hardliners do have point in that you cannot really succeed through diplomacy against terrorism. Who do you talk to?

The DMCA (and supposedly its European equivalent) is a living nightmare. While they apparantly thought better of it, a company with a deeply flawed copy protection product was considering legal action against a report proving how inept their technology was, instead of doing something worthwhile like fixing or pulling the product, as reported by Dan Gillmor. It is hard to come up with a better fictional example why the DMCA (and European equivalents) should be repealed.
Imagine if DMCA-like powers were given to pharmaceitical companies. They would then have actual legal power to discourage research on the effectiveness of their medicine. Does that really sound like a good idea to you? Do you consider recording companies more or less important to society than pharmaceutical companies? Wouldn't you expect the more important property to be better protected that the less important? So what's the conclusion: Blanket licences to produce snake oil, or an end to the DMCA? It is completely absurd that democracies are enforcing more and more legislation like the DMCA. It is in the direct counter-interest of the people, i.e us.

The question of the title is a remark by Esther Dyson in an interview at Foo Camp. To understand the question: There's a lot of talk about new reputation based networks, socalled social software, that is supposed to help us establish the various layers of acquiantance in virtual space, that we are accustomed to in our own physical space. Everybody is saying that social software will provide a new coherence to the digital lifestyle - and tons of money for the new top brands in this new software category. Dyson's answer to the question is 'no'. The reasoning, which I think is correct, is that governments work from some basic fairness principle that assume the initial anonymity and innocense of the citizens. This is firmly embedded in (western) ideas of a fair society. Social networks in general and reputation networks in particular apply the direct opposite logic. Youi have to prove yourself to enter into the network.
In my opinion, Dyson's point is exactly why ideas of minimal government are bad ideas. You have to give people a fighting chance and that requires a certain openness of society. It's one thing to have a legal system that is based on these fairness principles, but freedom means very little if welfare and opportunities for a livelihood and education aren't available to citizens in general.
It is important to note though, that in practice governments often run lots of reputation networks, and civil society provide plenty of fair and open opportunities (e.g. free markets), which is why the politics of equality always has to remain a fight. No institution can provide fairness and equality by it's existence alone.

Ideas are malleable and may be transformed into almost anything when seen in the proper light. That's why, when intellectual property rights advocates argue for copyright extensions, they think of their intellectual property as property: Even though they have been selling it to customers for years it is still their property. When they think of copyright violations the situation is reversed: Even though they still have the use of their material, they argue that you've stolen it from them. The metaphor of ownership and property simply doesn't work very well for ideas.

In general I think IP rights owners are in favour of use based pricing (material is provided on a time limited rental basis), whereas consumer advocates favour a notion of transfer of ownership via some 'physical act'. A token of ownership - either a unique physical copy of the material, or maybe a transfer of some unique digital token - gives you unlimited usage rights for the file. The reasoning behind the two positions is easily understood: For rights owners use based pricing preserves control of the copyrighted material, and adds repeated revenue from later reuse of the material. For consumer advocates transfer of a physical token of ownership does the exact opposite.

When evaluating the RIAA lawsuit campaign (Previous mentions here and here) I think it is actually in the consumer interest to turn the tables and argue for use based pricing when figuring out a reasonable settlement amount.
Lets suppose the entire revenue of the music industry came from use based pricing, and lets just suppose that the growth streak of the '90s had continued so that annual revenue of shipments when sold at suggested retail price was $20 billion (actual figure for 2002 is $12.6 billion down from a record high of $14.6 billion in 1999). That's $100 per adult american. Lets figure in a very uneven distribution of use, and only count the americans between 15 and 35 as music consumers.That's on the order of 75 mio people so we say $260 per consumer instead. That's like buying a CD or two every month - not too unreasonable an assumption. So if the way we paid for music was by use, a reasonable assumption on the loss of income from one consumer spending absolutely no money on music would be in the range of $250, say $1000 at the very high end of consumption. Instead we're hearing about $12000 settlements. The unsurprising conclusion: The settling file sharers are being railroaded.

Has anybody argued for a use based settlement point of view in court? If so, what happened? If it failed, why?

This, inspired by a longish post by David Weinberger covering Larry Lessig's pro-freedom copyright talk at Pop!Tech. As usual it is really good stuff. It is a blessing that someone keeps saying these completely obvious things about copyright and the way it is enforced today.

An alarming graph:
Created from numbers in a report on public knowledge of Iraq involvement with terrorist activity. The report uses the term 'misperception of Iraq' - a politically charged term - so one has to be careful in reviewing these findings: The questions asked are available and they seem reasonable as do the classification into right or wrong for the answers. On the other hand the graph above indicates an incorrect answer on any of the questions on Iraq that were asked, and that clearly increases the numbers, which may or may not be politically motivated. The variation in knowledge among viewers of the different networks is scary no matter how they scored the quiz though.

A short, well concerted and well funded media campaign by a wealthy and popular media person was all it took to make Arnold Schwarzenegger governor of California. While fixed four year terms for governors are not a natural law or essential for the democratic process, some degree of consistency is. As some commentators say; now that the recall has been established as doable (its been tried 32 times in California after various elections) one has to expect more aggresive attempts to repeat the success in the future which will take away time and energy from real politics. The only good news - and some will argue it is enough good news, is that election turnout was high and the position of voters clear on both recall and preferred candidate. But there is no way to know if Schwarzenegger could have put together support like this in a regular election - the drama of the campaign goes well with his character. Nor is there any way to know if election turnout would have been as high for a regular election, so the recally may mean nothing for the political consciousness of californians at all. And finally one has to wonder what would have happened with an alternate democratic strategy of "Just say no", instead of the chosen "If you do say yes to recall,vote for a democrat". That plan just seems so wishy washy. Especially in a pure character election like this one, that is very dangerous.

The Red Herring died, and the piece is not dated so it's impossible to tell when this piece on social tech was from. It argues that the many attempts at social software have two main flaws:

Too many incomplete protocols

Too much openness and explicitness

As to the first argument: Maybe so, but it is not an interesting problem. If somebody fixes it in an easy and affordable manner, then fine. It clearly has a technological fix.
The second point does not have a technological fix however. The problem with one unique advertised identity is that it corresponds very poorly to our off-line life. Keeping up with acquaintances in the same fashion you keep up with close friends will offend your friends and embarrass your acquaintances (or yourself). The flow of information around a person is much more sophisticated than that.

In a way, the incompatible and incomplete protocols protect us from waking up in such a flat nightmare society where relationships are indistinguishable from one another. Suppose the technical issues above we're fixed. We would immediately require the implementation of new barriers and ways to hide aspects of ourselves from others in particular situations and expose them in others.

The recent introduction of VeriSigns obnoxious SiteFinder service is , fortunately being fought from all angles. If ICANN let's VeriSign do this without taking away the com/net monopoly, we will need a new ICANN. VeriSign is not only hijacking the domain industry, but also the search industry and DNS itself. Meanwhile VeriSign is busy putting a 'we put customers first' spin on this abomination. Keep the lawsuits coming.

While we're waiting for this, we have to investigate the technical means for fightiing this service. Complete filtering of all traffic from the SiteFinder address is the most appealing option. This could be a very popular browser plugin.

BUT of course the ultimate solution is to 'fix' the DNS lookup itself - simply treating the SiteFinder ip-address as a black hole. Bind is currently being patched to do exactly that.

UPDATE
Here's a partial quick fix for the problem: Route the traffic to sitefinder via a nonexistent address. It is not efficient - it takes a while to fail - but it will give you the satisfaction of not generating traffic for SiteFinder...
If you're on a Windows NT/2000/XP machine here's how: Open a command prompt and use the following command
route -p ADD 64.94.110.11 MASK 255.255.255.255 10.100.10.0

What this does is force traffic to the SiteFinder address to route via the nonexistent 10.100.10.0 address. This assumes that you're actually on the same network as 10.100.10.0 (eg your address is 10.100.10.xxx and your subnet mask 255.255.255.0 or similar). The -p makes this route persistent so it remains after reboot.

Do let me know if you know of a good reason not to do this (i.e. harm to others of some kind. The local damage I can deal with)

The sadly pro-Arnold AlwaysOn network is, annoyingly, using their technology site and newsletters to run pro-Arnold politics. Lately in one of the blogs on the site, there's an interesting headline: California%u2019s Recall Hijacked :: AO. Perception is everything it seems. While the vote on voting machines does seem rather political, let's not forget who are the original hijackers here: The republican recall activists.

All the right people are objecting to a proposed e-voting standard. The standards effort is apparantly railroaded by the voting machine industry (and doesn't the fact that they're already doing this immediately disqualify the same industry from the trust we need in their product?) and the standard lives under the hideous assumption that voting is a technological problem in need of a technological fix. Of course not. Voting is politics and emotions, and the old adage on justice applies: 'Justice must not just be done, it must also be seen to be done'. In the same way our ability to understand and failure proof and manually verify the voting process is essential to the integrity of the vote. There is no technological fix to guarantee that. The only possible verification is bi-partisan verification of paper ballots. No amount of crypto, and certainly no signed guarantee from a closed source voting software company can provide the same assurance.
When democracy is at stake, price is just not an issue.

It is a lucky coincidence that corporations defend their unreasonable trademark and other IP rights so forcefully that we are never in doubt that they really shouldn't have those rights at all. Recent cases in point are the Fox vs Franken lawsuit on the use of the term 'Fair and Balanced' and then there's Sun's Terms of Use. They actually believe that they can reserve the right to mention Sun brands in sentences of particular forms, as reported by Cory Doctorow. Examples are along the following lines:

In a lengthy and technical (for a newspaper) account of the American tax system, "The Tax-Cut Con" in NY Times magazine, Paul Krugman dispells some of the myths of the tax haters, and reveals what looks like the master plan behind bush-o-nomics. A massive planned federal fiscal disaster that will make drastic cuts of social security and healtcare systems to a pre-depression level.
A abbreviated version of the argument goes like this: The current fiscal deficit is so drastic that it will not last another decade. When catastrophe ensues it will be completely impossible to combat the disaster by raising taxes, since that will shock the economoy badly if the taxes go up enough to have a meaningfull effect on the deficit. The only other alternative is drastic cuts in public spending and welfare programs are the only ones of sufficient size to matter in such a disaster.

In other words: According to Krugman, any notion that Bush is cutting 'responsibly' must be viewed as pure spin. He's just comforting voters until, faced with a complete disaster, they come around to his view of minimal government. Krugman also picks apart the anti-tax propaganda, describing it as consistently wrong and misleading in its description of the damages of taxation. In particular, the tax cuts consistently are marketed at the middle class, whil ein fact they rarely benefit anybody but the affluent.

David weinberger recommends this piece of anti-Bush propaganda. That disappoints me. The data in the report may be accurate but the piece is still just propaganda and that is bad news. While a robust fight against the end of democracy is required it shouldn't be carried using the weapons of totalitarianism (just as the fight against fundamentalism and nationalism in the middle-east shouldn't be carried out by falling back to more and more nationalism and fundamentalism at home). This is not in my mind a 'hawks vs. doves' issue - I wouldn't recommend any compromise on the issues - but clearly the messages just blur together into a large blitz of value based attack ads, and nobody is the winner after such a thorough destruction of reason and sanity.

Some further evidence that the Bush administration simply don't care about freedom and equality at all. The Attorney General, John Ashcroft, is now refusing select members of the press access to press conferences on tricky issues like the Patriot Act as reported here.
Only if your sense of fairness, openness and democracy has gone completely dark is that acceptable. Furthermore, the people doing the blocking are not his press people but Secret Service agents.
He should be fired just for this.

The day when Scandinavia once again was reminded that political assasinations are a reality even in our peaceful part of the world

And finally, today is also the 100th birthday of Theodor Adorno. Oddly appropriate that such a staunch critic of the modern world should find himself in accidental relationship with so much modern world sadness.

As an aside to Theodor Adorno's anniversary, it has been interesting being in Austria in the days leading up to his anniversary. His name was simply everywhere, in a way that would be unimaginable for any writer of books in Denmark, let alone a philosopher. He was on the cover of newspapers. Books published to commemorate the anniversary filled bookstore windows. Even the german language music video channel on my hotel TV set had a VJ who talked about Adorno (seriously! I'm not making this up).
I am not sure how much this is just a different 'sense of duty' wrt to the past and how much this is old fashioned book learning that is still alive and kicking in a broader sense in the German speaking world than in Denmark, but I think that it must mean that there still is a living Bildungsideal in a completely different sense than what's left of that kind of bookish culture in Denmark.

VJ's namedropping philosophers may not seem hot to you, but I think it is infinitely cool.

The Swedish social democratic party has lost once again one of its leading members, and Sweden its foreign minister as Anna Lind dies after being stabbed yesterday.

The circumstances of the event shows you how unused and unprepared we are for violence. An attack by a single person, in a (one supposes) busy Stockholm department store, and still the killer was able to get away.

As was the case with the murder of Olof Palme we now have to wait in unpleasant uncertainty, not knowing whether this was a random attack, an attack by a mentally unstable person or political violence.

UPDATE:
The most beautiful words heard yet in the many eulogies: 'She knew much about what had already happened but was intent on what was to happen [in the future]'. Source escapes me right now, but it was a Swedish political colleague of hers.

I've been reading lately on the American presidential race, and following that on the web is difficult to do in a balanced fashion. The web - as a forum for public discourse is characterized by the absence of dialogue and a proliferation of soapboxes (this being one of them) where people say exactly what they think is true. Some are worse than others of course - and I can't think of anything worse than the many right wing publications. The kind who do 'value politics'. The kind to whom all opposition therefore is immoral, and therefore not something to consider the merit of, but something to strike down. That position of course is as unsound and dangerous as any other fundamentalist position, be it left or right wing. Furthermore, the kind of argument put forward in favour of the cause always buts the cause first and the argument second. They couldn't care less about beating democrats on the issues. They just want to beat the democrats, since the democrats are quite simply evil. A case in point is a complete slamming of The BBC. The reason the right cares is of course the recent backlash against the strongly right wing Fox News channel after the war in Iraq. This has given BBC a foothold in North America, so now some countermeasures are needed.
The article even plays on the Fox News debate be reusing the words at the center of that debate - namely "Fair and Balanced"
Of course the author reaches the conclusion that the BBC is a wholly untrustworthy, pro-Hussein, tax payed, evil, out of control mammooth. Any and all means are used to reach the conclusion. At the center a coverage of the David Kelly hearings. This is laced with charcater attacks on the BBC personnel involved in that inquiry, attacks on BBC reporters pronunciation of "Paul Wolfowitz", quotes from other BBC bashers (who are quoted simply as the received opinion on the BBC, which they are not of course) even down to a mention of George Orwell and how he also hated the BBC. That BBC was critical of the decisions leading the the war in Iraq is of course interpreted as evidence of "the BBC's desire to prevent the death of Saddam's regime".

To give you an idea of the climate of this coverage, the story ends with a "funny" quote from another BBC basher: "About the only thing in Saddam's favor was that you could get the death penalty for listening to the BBC".

In short, there is quite simply nothing american right wingers won't say as long as it helps the goal of power.

I previously mentioned the AlwaysOn network - where Tony Perkins went after The Red Herring Folded as a usable resource. Seing the strong backing strong backing the these people are giving the 'Arnold for Governor' campaign I have to hold that endorsement.
Based on the premises that 'The recall is a good and democratic process', 'Arnold is a moderate' and 'It's a fresh start for California' a lot of AlwaysOn regulars and high profile tech businessmen endorse Schwarzenegger. A good idea? If the ability by 12 percent of voters (actual not registered) to stifle all political action for half a year was widespread we wouldn't have democracies at all. Surely the christian right would have had the ability to throw out Clinton. Surely Gore supporters would have been able to get together considerable recall momentum after the flawed presidential elections in Florida. Its like having democracy, but then having an escape mechanism if somebody is unhappy with that democracy. Moderate? Based on his campaign team - made up of republican veterans and even drawing on members of the current ruling republican faction -one should expect as little moderation as is exhibited by the Bush administration and its supporters. A fresh start? See previous answer. If it is such good news why all the republican veterans.
Isn't Arnold just a front for the same republican caste that currently runs the Bush administration?

136 applicants for a non-descript job managing a computer room and maybe teach users about the stuff on the computers. Doesn't say where, but presumably we're in Canada.
It makes Bray think about getting out of tech-jobs (not personally, but the general idea) - BUT the sad news is that this same story could have been told about so many other lines of work currently. There was one case here in Denmark of 2000 applicants for a public relations job (1 position to fill) at BMW. Assume a cursory 5 minute examination of just half these applications and the first 83 man hours zip by, a little more than two weeks worth, and you haven't even begun to consider the applications seriously. You basically have to just throw most of them away and consider the luck of the remaining applicants a qualification.

Mel Gibson and his parents are under fire today from a leading Jewish group for reportedly anti-semitic impulses in the former's new film and the latter's denial that Al Qaeda executed the Sept. 11 attacks.

It appears that at least Gibson's parents are holocaust deniers, and more recently and implausibly 911 deniers. Gibson has apparently not commented on this, but is busy making an 'accurate' ,'bible-true' account of the Passion of Christ - which of course means a film depicting (some) jews as evil and wrong.

A few PR friendly messages that "Mel loves everybody" will be a completely insufficient reply to criticism, considering the views of Gibsons father.

Yes, American politics has gone dark. Arnold Schwarzenegger willrun for governor in California. And he is not by a wide stretch the craziest candidate to announce his candidacy. Of course there are joke candidates in elections in any country - it's part of democracy - but there seem to be a lot of them in this particular election. With only a very brief election campaign for all the unknowns and poor candidates to put together a campaign, and Arnold currently being promoted at 1910 theaters of course he looks good in the campaign, unless of course voters find his bid for office a bit too opportunistic.

Election bureaucrats dismiss this as "paranoid," but (1) I trust professors of computer science more than courthouse hacks; and (2) Even to the extent that's true, a voting system that inspires paranoia is hardly a good thing.

This should be so obvious to everybody. It is similar to the old adage "Justice must not just be done, it must also be seen to be done". We simply cannot allow any doubts about the legitimacy of the vote. And this is likely to mean that we need a bi-partisan group of people to sit down and count X'es on pieces of paper.

While I'm sure the republicans would have you believe that they are the true keepers of the flame of freedom, they are also engineering more and more totalitarian schemes curbing that freedom, among the more serious are the secret no-fly lists. These non-published (as well in size as in actual content) list are banning thousands from the flying from American airports. Seeing as flying is the only reasonable means of transportation out of America this is a pretty clear violation of an individual's right to freedom of movement, one of the really old and really basic and uncontested human rights. It's is beeing used not just for clear dangers but also simply to stop some people who are merely 'inconvenient'

A 71-year-old Milwaukee nun and peace activist was stopped from boarding a flight to Washington, where she and a group of students planned to lobby the Wisconsin congressional delegation against U.S. military aid to Colombia. An art dealer who'd been a high-ranking staffer in Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential campaign had been barred from a flight to Germany after telling other passengers in the check-in line that President George W. Bush "is dumb as a rock." And two journalists, Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams of the antiwar magazine War Times, were told by an airline clerk that the were on "the FBI no-fly list."

This is not just nearly as bad as policies in the socialist Eastern Europe, but in fact exactly as bad as socialist Eastern Europe. It would have been unthinkable without the Bush administration.

Although the dot.com boom shows that VC's aren't necessarily a sign of good times and certainly not one of good technology, you need money to grow technology. So the news that funding has stopped sliding is good. this report says that VC spending for the second quarter of the year showed a sequential increase for the first time in about two years.

The results are clearly not best possible, not even Microsoft could pull that lie off. They're just plugs for Microsoft products.

Events like this makes it easy to imagine a world where the copyright cartel has won the battle of the digital realm, where websites are 'pay as you go', where you yourself have to put up your sites as 'pay as you go' sites because the majority of consumers are using a 'trusted' operating system that protect their eyes from freedom.
It could all come to happen. People are actively trying to make it happen.

Weblogs are turning into an interesting space for debate on politics and other issues where people disagree violently. The joy of the blog is that you get to say anything you like. It's yours. However if that freedom is to mean anything then it comes attached with an obligation to honor dissent at least to the extent of acknowledging it. This can be quite annoying of course if somebody is trolling your website.

That's why TrackBacks are such a wonderful opportunity to allow comments but still let your own site be about your opinion and not of those who disagree. It's simply a mechanism to tell other people that somebody elsewhere disagrees or has an opinion related to your opinion. That's why I disagree with Mark Pilgrims Comment Posting Policy [dive into mark] on TrackBacks:

Trackbacks are remote comments and are subject to these same rules [as local comments].

IF the rules were "no defamation, no ads, no off topic comment" that would be fine, but the rules are also "Not all posts have comments enabled, and this is intentional. Some posts have comments enabled for a limited time, and then no more comments may be added; this is also intentional." and then it really matters that TrackBack's are remote.
It helps the integrity of the weblog if TrackBack's aren't censored. TrackBack's acknowledge the fact that nobody owns an online discussion, and I think they should do so to any extent technically possible as long as defamation and off-topicness (commercial or otherwise) isn't an issue.

Doc Searls has written a soon to be classic piece about liberty and corporate censorship as it applies to the web and the internet. Brilliant stuff. Read it.

It tackles the monopolistic tendencies of the copyright wars, and of the current American government head on, in an open and level headed manner. It's all cluetrain stuff, but the important news is that it is written post DMCA, post Napster, so the celebratory 'We're all going to get along and make sense and be important' stance of ClueTrain is tempered with a knowledge that other forces are also at play and that they need to be addressed in a proper account of the internet.

The RIAA are suing everybody and have kranked up their legal gears to 75 subpoenas a day to violate your online privacy, as reported by Dan Gillmor. This is wrong and should be stopped, but it is unlikely to be since nobody - except online pundits like Gillmor - seems to fight against it.
Wouldn't this practice of mass privacy invasion be illegal if it occured in physical space? Imagine an organization finding it appropriate to obtain access to 75 homes per day to enforce their copyrights. Wouldn't that be unthinkable?

Our thesis is that legal regulation of the Internet should be governed by the layers principle - the law should respect the integrity of layered Internet architecture. This principle has two corollaries. The first corollary is the principle of layer separation: Internet regulation should not violate or compromise the separation between layers designed into the basic architecture of the Internet. The second corollary is the principle of minimizing layer crossing, i.e., minimize the distance between the layer at which the law aims to produce an affect and the layer directly affected by legal regulation

I like the idea. It highlights at least some of the ridiculous attempts at legislation in cyberspace, by understanding (correctly) that the basic architecture is not something the individual can change, and that it would not only be unjust, but a downright violation of my basic rights, if the medium in which I express myself (i.e. lower layers of architecture, like e.g. the http based servers and clients this message reaches you through) had built in mechanisms to examine the data I pass around.

Unfortunately (for the principle, but great for us) the nature of simulation and virtual machines means that you can always travel up and down the layer stack via simulation embedded in a layer under your control - as I have previously explained. Cory Doctorow's short story ownz0red covers the same stuff beautifully in the first couple of pages.

The Internet might soon be the last place where open dialogue occurs. One of the most dangerous things that has happened in the past few years is the deregulation of media ownership rules that began in 1996. Michael Powell and the Bush FCC are continuing that assault today (see the June 2nd ruling).
The danger of relaxing media ownership rules became clear to me when I saw what happened with the Dixie Chicks. But there's an even bigger danger in the future, on the Internet. The FCC recently ruled that cable and phone based broadband providers be classified as information rather than telecommunications services. This is the first step in a process that could allow Internet providers to arbitrarily limit the content that users can access. The phone and cable industries could have the power to discriminate against content that they don't control or-- even worse-- simply don't like

Scary perspective indeed, and a very real threat. Dean doesn't even mention the hideous Fox 'News' or other parts of the News Corp. republican campaign (New York Post with the original WW2 graves on the cover attacking France is also owned by News Corp.)

For a look at what Dean and others are up against check out this impressive list of books by right wing assholes. I wish I knew a nicer word for this kind of thinking, but I don't. The American right (well, some elements of it - of course there are decent poeple too) has a unique disregard for opinions other than their own, that is threatening all the life, the liberty and the pursuit of happiness for anyone who dares to disagree.
And these right wingers are the same people telling us about the totalitarian nightmares of communism. It's time for a new banner on classy.dk I think : 'Ideas don't pervert people. People pervert ideas'.

"Sadly, the threat of criticism is still with us," Bush told members of Congress during a 2 p.m. televised address. "We thought we had defeated criticism with our successes in Afghanistan and Iraq. We thought we had struck at its very heart with the broad discretionary powers of the USA Patriot Act. And we thought that the ratings victory of Fox News, America's News Channel, might signal the beginning of a lasting peace with the media. Yet, despite all this, criticism abounds."

"We are working with Google to fix that problem--we're going to close it so when you click on a link it will take you to a registration page," said Christine Mohan, a spokeswoman at New York Times Digital, the publisher of NYTimes.com. "We have established these archived links and want to maintain consistency across all these access points."

Google offers publishers a simple way to opt out of its temporary archive, and scuffles have yet to erupt into open warfare or lawsuits. Still, Google's cache links illustrate a slippery side of innovation on the Web, where cool new features that seem benign on the surface often carry unintended consequences.

BUT: CNET gets it wrong, as does the New York Times and Google for that matter. The problem is not that the pages stay up, but rather that they go away. The approach copyright holders is taking to the webspace (that information presented on the web is really a service, and that copyright holders may discontinue that service) is a threat both to consumers and to public space and to freedom of speech. The CNET piece has ample evidence of this: When some public office publishes material on the web, that material should be a matter of public record - and not something you can yank from the site if it turns out to hold unpleasent surprises for you. The same thing should go for other web content. If you have presented me with information, I should have the implicit right to hang on to that information, simply because my right to hold you accountable for having published the information is essential. Everything in our history tells us that there are no good reasons to hold a contrary position to this and that the right to know is essential for the right to speech to hold any meaning.

Digital copyright law as it exists should be illegal and if we all had good constitutions it would be unconstitutional.

Could somebody please enlighten me on the difference between this kind of box office numbers and this kind of campaign financing.
The language used by NY Times to assess the 'power' of the candidates by looking at their fundraising ability is strikingly similar with the lingo used by Hollywood box-office trackers. The primaries seem to be turning into a sports fight on funding. Could it be that elections have now gone so deeply meta that the public relations of the fund drive is beating the politics the funding is used to promote for media interest?

I am not a big Kevin Werbach fan, but he has posedan interesting question: Is Howard Dean Barry Goldwater? Meaning, "Dean is probably too liberal and too New Englandy to get elected, but he does provide a voice for liberal sentiment without the usual excuses of a democratic that is routinely attacked as morally inferior". That is an interesting point.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced Sunday that they
are suspending attacks against Israel for three
months, a leader of the group said. But there was
still no announcement by Yasser Arafat's Fatah
party, with wrangling still going on over the
final wording of the truce statement.

Let's suppose the announcement is for real, and that the militant palestinian opposition to Israel is as organized as the Israelis say they believe it is.
While it takes just one man with a bomb to break the truce, this announcement could be a true test on the resolve of Ariel Sharon's government to follow up the good intentions from the Bush, Sharon, Abbas meeting a month ago.

Some old news (a month or so):
The hideous practice of publishing 'open' standards while asserting commercial ownership of ideas included in the standard has been adressed over the last couple of years by the W3C. That effort has been completed with the announcement of a royalty-free patent policy.

The effect of the patent policy is that all who participate in developing a W3C Recommendation must agree to license patents that block interoperability on a royalty-free basis

That's only half of what corporations interested in a standards organization Stamp of Approval should do, but on the other hand, if maintaining property of the specs can thwart other vendors effort to 'embrace and extend' (that's 'engulf and emasculate' in non-vendor speak) standards then fine by me.

Steve Talbott and I agree that science radically challenges and changes our understanding of who we are and what it means to be a human being. Talbott thinks this is a bad thing whereas I think it is a good thing.
I also think however that Talbott defeats his own argument, in an otherwise brilliant debunking of Bill McKibbon's 'Enough' that can be found in NetFuture #144.

McKibbon is worried that we should lose ourselves completely through genetic alteration. Talbott rightfully challenges this idea: "No one can, in absolute terms, rob someone else of meaning."

And he is right of course: No amount of genetic alteration will undo the fact that even the genetically altered human being will be a self, and experience as a self. It is not robbed of meaning.
So what then does science in fact do to humanity? It clearly does not rob us of introspection. It liberates our understanding of self from any binding it might have had to arbitrary facts of the flesh such as 'we can only run 35 km/h - and only for a short while'. As far as I am concerned that purifies our spirit. It doesn't debase it.

The notion that once upon a time there was some 'ur'-people, living in a golden age, and being essentially and purely human is one of the really old chestnuts of (political) philosophy and it is almost implied by Talbott's reasoning. Talbott makes repeated reference to meaning and purity of human spirit that once was ours but now is lost:
He adopts from McKibbons book the idea that The automobile wrenched us loose from local community; television isolated us from our immediate neighbors; divorce as a mass phenomenon cast a shadow of uncertainty over every family; and the natural world itself has been arbitrarily re-shaped according to our habits and appetites, so that it no longer offers us "a doorway into a deeper world".

But there has never been a golden age. The car less (preindustrial) society kept masses of peasants unfree and poor, since industrialization was not feasible when transportation was slow and difficult and expensive and thus did not offer as many jobs in the factories and the cities. Televison taught me English, so that I could understand Talbott's and McKibbon's reasoning. The divorce free society kept women all over the world bound to their homes, unfree and entirely at the mercy of their husbands, relying solely on his income for stability. I do grant that medicine has deprived us of some of the profound insights of the past, such as the fact that pneumonia and tuberculosis kills you with almost absolute certainty.

George Lakoff on "Metaphor, Morality, and Politics". Subtitled Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust the piece sets out to explain the morals of American politics from an abstract metaphorical basis. Fascinating stuff.

While failing to produce any evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (leaving the Iraqi invasion exposed as pure power politics, so pure in fact that the arab world will likely keep screaming 'imperialism') the American military continues it's hunt for Saddam.

a convoy of vehicles struck last week by US forces following 'firm' information that the former Iraqi leader and members of his family were travelling in the Western Desert near Syria
While a live uncaptured Saddam poses a strong risk as martyr material, I suppose it is unlikely that he has survived as an actual political or military threat.

As for myself, I am still undecided on the recent war. Saddam will not be missed, but it is uncomforting to be living again in a world where geopolitics also means large scale unilateral invasions of foreign countries.
Combine with the stifling of human rights even in the western world in the name of anti-terrorism. There's a newfound innocence that has been lost again, and a freedom that needs to be regained.

As we're ramping up for presidential elections, and Bush is fumbling the ball in Iraq and in economics Doc Searls located WatchBlog: 2004 Election News, Opinion and Commentary - the novelty is that three blogs are maintained on one page, one for the democrats, one for the republicans and one for 'third way' dissenters.

Dan Gillmor on US anti-terrorism bills. And once again, cowed European politicians were quick to follow. I'm scanning for the news story from yesterday on danish legislation requiring ISP's to register and store one year of connection records for their customers for later anti-terrorism review.
This is a problem in itself, but we probably heard less about it than we could have because it makes it prohibitively expensive to grow 'cottage networks' in local neighbourhoods, which of course is good news for the big ISPs.

Bill McDermott, CEO and president of SAP Americas, said advertisements run last week in the Financial Times and other publications were designed to woo J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft customers grappling with uncertainty about those companies' directions

The only nice thing there seems to be to say about prime minister Berlusconi is that he's only in it for the money. It could have been world domination. But still, his reign in italy constitutes the most rabid abuse of power for personal gain in memory. The recent accelerated legislation providing immunity is just one more sad piece of evidence.

What is most interesting about Berlusconi is the brazenness with which he flaunts his power. Open (commercial) censorship. Changes to the criminal justice system.
Compared to that the redistribution from poor to rich in America (through extreme tax reforms) and the strong ties between the republican party providing the government funds and industry providing the election capital in America seems to be under much better control: American politics is about government power and state security, and not personal gain, even if the spoils of war are harvested with great energy. And presidents don't always get reelected.

By the way, you may enjoy the profound insight of the Leader Of The Free World on his father's famous 'lip sync' accident: I think the mistake was to say, `read my lips' ... and then raise the taxes.. Deep, deep stuff.

The Oracle, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards love triangle is heating up. It is interesting that J.D. Edwards is able to bring a lawsuit forward at all. They are (not yet) owned by PeopleSoft and Oracle has made no bid for them, so the legal relationship between Oracle and J.D. Edwards is formally accidental, even if everybody seems to smell a rat.

The notion that actions of A against B makes A liable for harm done to C opens up a wonderful, huge gray area to interpretation. Suppose a creditor of Your Essential Supplier puts the squeeze on YES so they can't deliver to you. Could you then sue the creditor for claiming his payment?

Strangely (if you're a hobbyist Redmond basher like me), the Microsoft sponsored magazine Slate has teeth: In "The Return of Class War - Bush and the new tyranny of the rich." by Michael Kinsley, Bush's recent tex reform is criticized quite sharply. And of course the recent complete sellout on media diversity did turn a lot of heads.
Then there's the failure to find WoMD's in Irag, and the still soft economy. Bush's power as president could be waning.

In a news story with the good news that Novell challenges SCO's Unix claims - important since Novell sold whatever rights SCO may have to SCO - the SCO CEO is beginning to sound desperate:McBride added that unless more companies start licensing SCO's property, he may also sue Linus Torvalds.
In short, they've now traded a possibly legitimate dispute with IBM for full-on berserk fear campaign (YOU could be SUED!!!)

So what is there to do:

Stop using SCO products. Remember 'burn all GIFs day'?

Wait for SCO come forward with explicit material they consider infringing (we're talking lines of code and specific designs). Only then can the possible damage be assessed and the march to remove that material to kill the issue for good begin. This is the content of Novell's action.

If design principles are on the 'what is a filesystem' level - i.e. unix philosophy that cannot be removed without killing the system - then we must simply hope (and assume) that IBM can fight it out and win in court. The Novell statement (which seems unprovoked by any lawsuit against Novell) is important in that regard of course

The open source community has to look at the bigger picture of corporate sponsorship of open source code. Whenever ideas arising in closed source environments migrate to an open source world this kind of issue could resurface dependent on the sponsors economic ability and willingness to sustain sponsorship and on any disputes over ownership of the original closed source.

The Volvo photo ban is part of a general trend. Lawrence Lessig reports two separate incidents of gratuitous no-photo policies at Starbucks. And they try to turn their locations into homey hangouts where people go to be. Who would want to be there if you can't do normal harmless things like taking snapshots of your friends.

In a museum or other place where exploitable copyrighted material exists it makes sense. Elsewhere it's just an invasion on your freedom.

In a nice bit of Newspeak, the Bush administration has renamed the "Total Information Awareness" program "Terrorism Information Awareness". It's the same thing presumably. Large scale datamining with automatic text translation of foreign information sources. No public control. No policies for what bodies of data this new capability can be employed on.

The rise of better and better tools for analyzing the data floating around will mean that we will desire more and more data to not float around. The public space is closing.

On MSNBC a pro-Bush reporter is proud to stifle opposition. I wouldn't trust the views he presents as Danny Glover's either, but actively trying to take away Glover's income as a way of stifling him and being proud about it is just terrible.
Meanwhile, on Danish television, an episode of "The Practice" airs - presenting the 'controversial' idea of an airline company refusing all arabs as passengers. The notion that this is 'controversial' and not just dismissable as flat out unacceptable is another sad case of American politics gone berserk. I know shows like 'The Practice' breed of the emotional charge of the storyline - but since it's a given the policy will stand (no point to the story if the company was found guilty of racism) this isn't controversial but just a throwback to the darkness of the 50s. A conflict founded in the deserts of the Middle East can hardly be called a cold war, but is certainly looking a lot like one.

While we're on the subject: Freedom fries instead of french fries? When are they going to tear down the Statue of Liberty? That was a gift from the French - remember.

At last! Everybody is saying that Apple's new online music store has a shot at surviving. About time. The catalogue available will be rather limited, but I will for instance be able to keep up with the best of super producer team The Neptunes' work without having to but the other trash american 'R&B' starts put on their albums.
One dollar per song sounds about reasonable for permanent ownership. It is comparable to record store prices.
It is not surprising that Steve Jobs was the one who pulled it together now that it has been pulled together, he is after all equipped with his own personal 'reality distortion field', but what a struggle it has been.
What's next? Well, I would like this to end as an above-board Napster. The record labels fail to make their catalogues available in any sensible way. The joy of Napster was not the 2 million servers offering Britney Spears' latest hit but that one guy in Singapore who happened to have digitized that obscure B-side from that Los Angeles Negros single you loved so much.
If iTunes made it possible to come forward with material like this, I would gladly pay the copyright holder the requisite dollar, if Apple would be willing to act as the exchange. It is the possibility of actually getting rare recorded material that is compelling.

The reference de jour for the important issue of the new activist doctrine for American foreign policy seems to be The Mission by Washington Post reporter Dana Priest.

It is important to point out, though, that it is the civil leaders of the Pentagon - not the actual leaders of the military - who are advocating this new activism. In an interview on the Danish TV news show 'Deadline', political scientist Barry Posen made this important point. It is of course important (and very reassuring) that the military itself is not advocating this new political role, so that the application of this kind of forign policy is under firm democratic control.

The use of force instead of diplomacy on the foreign policy front is accompanied by an equally disturbing abuse of the legal system on the home front as the Bush administration is speeding America into darkness.
The abuse of POW status as a way to deny civil rights to prisoners is twisted this time around as a suspect is held without rights as a witness in relation to the 'war against terror'.
It's like the linked story says: Kafkaesque, or just plain old totalitarian, methods in the land of the free. Scary indeed.

As a giveaway of my eager consumption of pop-culture trash, I once again remark that George Lucas could end up having created some important pop trash with the new 'how did the world go evil' Star Wars prequel. The resemblances to the current situation are interesting, even if one should be careful to refer to anything present in the Sar Wars films as 'scary' or 'important'

It is interesting to remember the key point of Paul Kennedy's book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" - namely that the sheer cost of maintaining the military power required to hold on to power is what eventually weakens and destroys powerful nations.
This sound like a theory that could have been put forward in the year 1400 as well, when the role of the king was just the upkeep of his own household and his army, but the point of Kennedy's book is that it remains true even for more modern regimes. When the Soviet regime collapsed it became clear that an unsound proportion of the GDP was pumped into the military, so the next question remains: Will this apply to the United States also?

The recently approved cost of approximately $80bn for the "War against terror" - mainly the fight against Iraq, adds 30%-50% to the budget deficit. The economy is weak already, and it is no entirely clear that America wil be able to foot this bill without dire economic consequences.
Add to that the recent turn in american politics reducing the Secretary of State to a more marginal role and focusing on America's ability to act with force. If the Iraq war cannot be contained in Iraq, of if success in Iraq proves to Bush that massive military action is a quick and effective way to deal with foreign policy then we could be at a world-order toppling economic disaster.

Classy.dk - the finest unread news source I write - is of course not alien to the requirements of the media. They are unavoidable. Scans of my referrer logs reveal the strangest porn searches - searches for which I crop up as the umpteenth possible link - are still generating hits. And of course the default style sheet of moveable type looks positively ugly when the text doesn flow ad infinitum down the screen. That must be the blog version of dead air.

I think I've posted this before - but let me just briefly remind you that the sculptor Hein Heinsen has developed a beautiful response to the constantly escaliting attention grabbing nature of the culture of ideas, namely to produce only very few of them. In fact he tries entirely to avoid ideas - making only hard to define constantly shifting sculptures meant to be simple being as opposed to being about. A beautiful sentiment - even if it is a complete failure inasmuch as he is doing this in a museum as a proxy for actual being outside the museum, and in that respect merely being about being instead of being being (all with me sofar?)
As a darwinistic strategy for the attention or idea economy (same thing) that clearly sucks - which of course is why we don't see it much in the media. The people getting your attention are most definitely trying to do so.
This observation about the media is also the first warning against believing in the 1-1 society promised to us by the cluetrain people. Attention and networks constructed from it just don't work that way.
An indication of how skewed the world of attention is can be found in the beforementioned referrer logs. Basically the demand curve for information is so incredibly skewed that I get as many hits from being at the absolute periphery of some of the big ideas (like porn) as I get from being at the center of whatever classy.dk is really about.
In fact it might be worthwhile to write down the math of search according to some decent model of site popularity distribution and search term occurence statistics. If the demand curve for information was flat I would all my hits from searches where my site was basically the single most important match (as evidenced by the surrender monkeys incident). If the curve was skewed excessively compared to 'supply curve' of page indexes, then mismatches from failed searches should outrank the relevant matches.
The end result is probably a slight skew towards relevancy, indicating that the web is more polarized than the demand statistic.

This seat of the pants math may be all wrong (it's late) but it should be good fun to examine this in more detail.

If you were wondering about the legitimacy of the news-coverage of the war in Iraq you need look no further than the banner ads for CNN's war tracker that I found here. A convenient little desktop application giving you access to the latest and greatest in blood and mayhem - and served to you with the light hearted slogan "Click! It's quick!". I'm sure that slogan was also in the hopeful minds of President Bush and his staff when they pushed the button and decided to go to war, but really... Even trashy news sources like CNN should be able to do better than 'a convenient desktop tracker' in covering this very real and deadly crisis.

The champion of 'humanistic intelligence', Steve Mann has defined a new buzzword: Sousveillance. As a piece of language the term is a bit contrived but the idea is interesting. The claim is that what's bad about surveillance is not really the act of surveillance itself, but it is the secrecy and the dehumanizing anonymity of eyes in the sky.
He proposes another way to add further introspection to the commons that keeps societey open but still makes the world smaller and safer - namely surveillance 'from below' (hence the new term 'sur' is 'over', 'sous' is 'under') - meaning technology enhanced 1-1 interactions as the legitimate way to information augment society. His thinking is that it's not really the permanent record the being remembered and held accountable for individual actions, but the correlating and anonymous collection of data instead.
It's an interesting idea to think about even if the idea of the 'sousveillance society' remains rather half baked. It has a strong interplay with ideas of identity in web-space, where ideas of signed encrypted person to person exchanges of identity tokens are beginning to take shape along side more bigbrotherian identity from above, pushed by governments and big corporations (As an aside, Orwell would have loved the newspeak inherent in the name Liberty Alliance. What has emerged from this organization is nothing but big-iron heavy handed control organization identity. No freedom inside.)

So while on my day off, contemplating the fate of NATO I went looking for some links to acidic rhetoric (or is rhetoric base - I forget). The best page on the Simpson invented insult 'Cheese eating surrender monkeys' must be this one.

In fact this guy is funny all the way. Among the good stuff he's dug up is a reality-show golddigger who freudian-slips and confuses 'merciful' or 'missionary' with 'mercenary'...

If you're not following Warblogging you should be. It is a very good review of the dangers that American freedom is failing entirely to deal with in response to 911. All the freedom invading legislation, and the practices in the face of legislation are reviewed as is the current NATO crisis which is of course a sad case of no one doing the right thing. The decision by France and Germany to up the ante and force the decomission of NATO is the most terrible abuse of an international organization for local means I can think of. That the veto should be anything but is ridiculous. France and Germany must know that what is going to happen will happen regardless of the veto, they have only assured the destruction of NATO with the destruction of Iraq. It looks mainly like domestic policy use of NATO run amok.

In contrast - even if you do disagree with Bush - you can't really accuse him of doing this as a pure interior policy initiative since it might very well be political suicide. If the war drags on into 2004, Bush will not look good as the creator of the next Vietnam, i.e. an unclear conflict on unfriendly soil against an unclear group of enemies without a clear goal. Clearly a war that cannot be won.

The changes in legislation to curb terrorism are a lot scarier than this, since this is erosion of the democracy of the worlds only superpower - 'our former ally' as we may soon have to say. Arguments for the legislation and limitation of rights invariably invoke an image of martial law, i.e. a time limited voluntary restriction of rights to defeat the enemy. But the war on terrorism will not be won in any clear sense of the word. That's not saying that it shouldn't be fought -I think by and large it should - its just that it will never end, or it will not end as a result of American actions at least.So this legislation will never go away again. And that is a very real threat to democracy. It is not really important whether it is to protect the personal safety of a dictator or the public safety of most of the population; if a society is based on a basic and widespread fear of the anonymous citizen it can never be a democracy. The new legislation being proposed seems very much to be that.

The politics of George Paine (anti-Bush and anti-war) are clear, but even if you disagree the summary of the situation he offers is sober and worthwhile.

In a previous post I hyperlinked a short text by Clayton M. Christensen - remarking then that the article may have just been a rehash of the ideas from his bestselling book The Innovator's Dilemma. It was.

It is a very interesting book and it is well researched, with precise accounts of cases of disruptive and sustaining innovation in a number of different markets.
The ideas presented are clear, and clearly backed up by the cases given. After having read it one can't help though to be left with two feelings:

The article really explains the ideas with sufficient detail in a much shorter space

There is surprising little reference to the obvious and quite complete biological analogy of his findings

As to the first point: The description of Christensen's discovery is quite adequate in the Tech Review article. What is not there, is the accounts of how to deal with disruptive change, as well of course as the detailed case stories.

As to the second point: There is a passing reference only to the almost complete analogy to the theory of evolution Christensen's ideas present.

We can give his findings in biological terms, cluetrain style. First in Christiansens terms:

Companies exist in value networks of suppliers and consumers offering 'compatible' goods to one another

Different value networks coexist in the same market

Well-run companies generally are good at offering products competing within their own value network with substitutable products from other companies within the network

Value networks migrate. That is, as technology changes supply chains relevant in one value network may invade other value networks, beating out the existing companies within the network

And in biological terms:

Companies are biological organisms

The market is their ecosystem

The value network is an ecological niche

The survival of the fittest takes place as a fight for resources within an ecological niche - as a direct competition for comparable resources

Ecological niches migrate. As organisms evolve, they migrate toward consumption of other more available resources, thus crowding out original consumers of a given resource

The analogy is perfect and explains Christensen's findings. The fact that companies fail to see the disruptions as competition may be seen simply as a case of the disruptors utilizing different resources. Eventually the disruptors migrate towards the resources consumed by the incumbents but not at onset.
Clearly the evolutionary pressure does not pitch the disruptors against the incumbents, since they occupy different niches, so the incumbents do not evolve to fight the disruptors.

Christensen does mention ideas like this that apparently appear in the literature, but he dismisses them, even though they perfectly explain his findings. His dismissal comes from a an unwillingness to accept the determinsm inherent in this biological mapping, but even his alternative theory of how organisms, er companies, adapt to disruption has biological interest.

Let's just review the two main competing ideas of evolution when that theory was new. The idea that environmental pressure forces change has been discovered by several scientists through history. Before Darwin there was Lamarck. Lamarck is mainly famous for his theory that behavioural change forced by environmental change is actually heriditary, which is obviously false for the theory of gene based evolution, that has been so successful.

The determinism in the economic uses of evolutionary theory comes about as a darwinian consequence of the mapping to biological terms.
While evolution in darwinian terms means that the species adapts, no individual organism can change to adapt, they merely fail or succeed. But companies can adapt. Indeed, the dstinguishing characteristic of cultural, knowledge based systems - as opposed to natural, gene based systems - is that culture is Lamarckian.
Cultural evolution is based on adapting individuals that are changed by the changes in their ecological niche.

The other reference that comes to mind related to this book is Thomas Kuhn's 'The strufture of scientific revolutions'. This too presents a mapping, an even more obvious one, where the disruptions constitutes paradigm shifts in the field of industry. This analogy is also absent from the book.

A modification of the copyright system that satisfies both the need to keep the public space open and the rights of ownership for intellectual property would be extending fair use to fair recovery. If copyrighted material languishes in the private space of the copyright claimant and a case can be made that the property rights of the material are not being exercised fairly (i.e. at non-ridiculous prices) then the rights to fair use should also include the right to obtain the material in the first place.

Lessig points to a suggestion for a copyright extension tax which adds a small charge to copyright extensions. Failure to pay for the extension immediately makes the copyrighted material available to the public.
This accomplishes approximately the same thing, but not quite. First of all people might object to the tax as 'yet another way to put money in government pockets', and secondly - it does not prevent the censorship by ownership that is becoming commonplace. To me that is the real target for the activity to keep the public domain open.

You might argue that the cost of litigating to exercise the right to fair recovery would likely incur a higher cost than the copyrigh extension tax, but that goes both ways and it is entirely likely that it is cheaper for copyright holders to make their material available through some kind of library system if not to the general public. Many countries have rules like this for archival purposes anyway.

A case has been presented to limit the possibility of extending copyrights perpetually - the most balanced account of the case seems to bethis one.

At Lawrence Lessigs website an account if made of how copyright holders by not exercising their exclusive marketing rights are effectively removing copyrighted works from history - since no one can get at them.
It seems clear - with a few well-run franchises (Elvis and Mickey) as the exception - that this does not really hinder the cultural evolution where the arts are concerned. A evolutionist view of the story would be that since copyright holders are so ineffective at deriving value from their memes other memes take over and dominate our cultural space, rendering the discussion insignificant. A Case in point would be the rise of Manga comics in the west. It satisfies curiosities the old memes fail to adapt to. Further witnesses to the insignificance of the lawsuit would be the short shelf-life of contemporary music, the short shelf-life of most movies etc.

Of course I am a little too much of an old-world character to actually think like that. We nostalgics do believe in historical value. But still it is a persuasive argument even if you like old culture.

In the case of technology and science time limits are essential to the extent that ownership of old ideas induces ownership of the new, but the pace of invention itself means that there are time limits on the economic viability of an idea, since it will be rendered meaningless by future ideas not yet discovered/created.

The plot of The Game - David Finchers third feature film - turns out to have a real counterpart almost as fantastic as the secret leisure organisation in the film. The players of Cthulhu Lives! stage highly realistic live-action games of tremendous dimensions in time and space. This is not like the Murder Mystery evening or weekend games that one can buy but lengthy, meticulously enacted excursions into the world of H.P. Lovecraft.

A while back I made a comment about the differences between e.g. drugs and software when it comes to intellectual rights, and how this should lead to different rules for copyrighting these very different intellectual properties. It seems from this article that I'm in good company. Well, in company at least. There's a quote in that article from Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas that is almost to the same effect as my position. I gather Lessig is a controversial character - at least in the US - and all the talk of the commons would tend to brand him as left wing, but really I don't think this as to be a partisan issue.

The argument is not against the idea of property at all, but rather that the claims of property- in the case of software - are too weakly formulated to hold merit. Since nobody documents software properly, closed source means that the claim of property becomes rather vague and you can make all kinds of claims of infringement from a relatively broad purely functional definition of software. You need that physical aspect of the software that is the actual construction process, i.e. you need the source at some point.

The second part of that argument is that the vagueness of software interfaces means that any property claim is effectively much wider than it appears since nobody but the source holder can figure out how to make good use of the copyrighted software. This effectively broadens the patent beyond any original claim, which is of course very much the case with Windows and the blurry distinctions between the platform and the Office applications.

For a related discussion of the entertainment industry's killer grip in online freedom, this article is just great.

With a government unwilling to stop Microsoft from 'upselling' the operating system as everything they consider profitable or interesting (i.e. the Office suite etc. etc.) - leaving competitors without a fighting chance - there's little chance of stopping Microsoft. Latest case in point is the beginning of the end of an alternative platform for digital authentication as Liberty Alliance Waves White Flag at Passport.

Previously I made a comment about the link between digital technologies, intellectual property and personal freedom. It still seems to me that the digitization of our personal space means that we will to a greater and greater extent extrovert our thoughts into some technological device (e.g. classy.dk) - when we do that we are suddenly publishers - and intellectual property rights owners think they have some rights on our expression. The conflict between the principles of the information economy and the principles of individual liberty become very important and visible. The grandfather of digital risks to personal freedom is of course the fear of the universal personal ID

It is very hard to have a reasonable and workable opinion about these issues. The digitization presents remarkable opportunities for prosperity and a good life, but making them mandatory (btw as a left leaning Scandinavian I have been happily centrally registered for ages) makes them dangerous.
Our notions of society simply don't cover the networked society, and our network does not really support any notions of society at all (except a naively open one). Using current technology the digital life is essentially a public life.
Clearly 'freedom of speech' must be augmented with a constitutional principle of 'fair use' - since we will be users of so many technical and semi-technical interfaces, and since text and other forms of 'speech' more and more become something we use, i.e. more and more active functionally as opposed to purely being expression, but I'm not sure that does really cover what the notion of Networked Man should be.

This btw. relates to the very way we build our technology. Only open adaptable technology makes it possible for the individual to choose NOT to join the collective.

Danish science writer Tor Nørretranders (of "The User Illusion" (Mærk Verden in danish) fame) has written a new book on evolution, cooperation, the gift economy, and sex. The basix premise : Everything we do, we do basically for sex. Sex is the ONLY major driver for human endeavour.

Not having read it yet it sounds like this book fits into the same mould as his previous books. The basic premise can be inferred from general principles (The laws of evolution in this case) without writing a 330 page book. Scientific ideas used to sell the story are oversold as controversial and sometimes they are even oversold as new. A Case in point for this books seem to be 'the economics of cooperation' as analyzed using the Prisoners Dilemma. This is one of the oldest ideas in 'experimental mathematics', and newspapers were covering this story at least 10 years ago. Thirdly - once the creative (or other) juices start flowing, the story tends to get ahead of the basic premise, and some wild claim is added to the mix. In this case the merging of 'gift economy' (e.g. Open Source) and the whole sex thing.
It's a shame - the basic story is interesting in and of itself. The setup to make all this magical and exciting makes the story less appealing to me. I'd like just the facts - without the mystery. The notion that there has to be a msytery around for a phenomenon to be exciting is dangerous in my opionion.

p.s.

While the domain business is 50% porn (and no, that is not a stupidly generalized exaggerated number, it is just a fact) I can assure you - talking from work, while updating the servers on a sunday afternoon, huge cold coming on, hung over from yesterdays birthday bash - that there is absolutely no sex involved in the actual work here at Ascio

Just a brief summary of Wireless Networking Business Basics as I understand them.

The fact that Organic's idea so resembles what one hears about Boingo and the further fact that this idea seems so highly copyable reminds one of the early internet. The promises are the same, and may be summarized as Pure Network Effect. The business problem could also be the same : There is no barrier to entry, so a stampede effect at any sign of momentum is a very real danger. Basically there is no first mover advantage in pure wireless IP traffic. IP is the great equalizer of networks, which is of course both a blessing and a curse.

The winner would be anybody able to leverage a platform advantage in any way shape or form. For a while there the mobile phone networks looked as if they might be that advantage to their owners, having a solid network already established of radio transmitters and receivers. They are presently aggresively squandering their advantage by asking the same prices, that make some sense for voice, for data transmitted over the GPRS networks which makes no sense at all. The value of data, per unit of information, is significantly less than the value of voice traffic.
They seem to have no recollection of the speed with which proprietary network providers like CompuServe and Prodigy lost market power on initial web uptake. With WiFI on the horizon and fixed networks at flat rate prices widely deployed traffic prices like the current GPRS pricing seem positively archaic.

Ironically the phone-oligarchies (i.e. the almost monopolies that used to be monopolies) could have the platform advantage to beat out everybody in the WiFi space as well. A combined WiFi/ADSL plan with a rebate (e.g. more bandwidth at the same price) for letting your ADSL line serve as a WiFi hotspot could be a plausible way to cover metropolitan areas with WiFi.

It is of course easy to find something to criticize (the definite association with violent left wing activists in the 70s and some questionable pictures of Fischer taking part in violent protest himself) but the successful reinvention of Die Grünen as a reform-friendly pragmatic modern political party is impressive. And Fischer has actually been able to communicate this new line of policy to a sizable group of voters.
If only something similar could happen in Denmark, we, the right-moving left-wingers, would be happy.

We are unfortunately much more likely to see something like Gerhard Schröders power-clinging, cheap attacks on American foreign policy. A new low point in election time sellout. It is one thing to see isolationist foreign policy rhetoric at election time in American politics, but in modern European politics it is just completely out of place. What's next? An attack on France?

As previously reported, an absurd proposed legislation would allow invasion of privacy to interfere with P2P sharing of copyrighted data.Bruce Schneier has the quote: They're trying to invent a new crime: interference with a business model

This quote could also be applied to the ridiculously broad patents (btw. Software Patents : Just say no) on business models being issued during the Boom era (I'm guessing the failure of companies like priceline has tempered the pace of this particularly absurdity). Making first mover advantage a law is not a good idea.

No this is not an article about a failed 2M Invest company... Actual legislation is being proposed in the US Congress to allow any copyright holder to hack the hackersas reported on K5. In short, the proposed bill provides immunity for a number of possible liabilities caused by interfering with another party's computer, if the intent was explicitly - and upfront - to foil illegal use of copyrighted material.

This is the old "If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns" idea. Let the good guys give the bad guys a taste of their own medicine. Only, in the virtual world, where boundaries of location (especially in a P2P world) are abstract and hard to define, it seems to me that this bill is an extension of the right to self defence and the right to protect the sanctity of the home, to actually allowing aggresive vigilante incursions on other peoples property, when the other people are accused of copyright infringement.

It goes right to the core of current intellectual property debates, and raises in a very clear way the civil right issues involved in the constant and rapidly increasing attempts at limiting right-of-use for lawfully purchased intellectual property. Whose property IS intellectual property anyway?

UPDATED 20020731

In the olden days - when intellectual property was securely tied to some kind of totem, a physical stand-in for the intellectual property, in the form of the carrier of the information, i.e. a book or an LP or similar, there was a simple way to settle the issue. Possesion of the totem constituted an interminable right of use of the intellectual property. The only intellectual property available on a per-use basis was the movies. Live performance does not count in this regard, since live performance is tied to the presence of the performer, and the consumption of live performance is not therefore a transfer of an intellectual property to the consumer, in that it is neither copyable or transferable or repeatable.
It is of course the gestural similarity with live performance that has led to the rental model for film.

As the importance of the totem began to degrade, so began the attacks on the physical interpretation of intellectual property. We have seen these attacks and reinterpretations of purchase through the introduction of casette tapes, video tape, paper copiers, copyable CD rom media, and now just the pure digital file.

At each of these turning points attempts are made to limit the right-of-use to film-like terms. Use of intellectual property is really just witnessing of a performance. So you pay per impression, and not per posession.
What is interesting of late, and in relation to the lawsuit, is both the question of whether this 'artistic' pricing model is slowly being extended from the entertainment culture to all cultural interaction. Modern software licenses are moving towards a service-model with annual subscription fees. This could be seen as a step towards pure per-use fees for all consumable culture - an idea that is at least metaphorically consistent with the notion of the information grid. Information service (including the ability to interact) is an infrastructure service of modern society, provided by information utilities, and priced in the same way as electrical power.
In practice you do not own the utility endpoints in your home - the gasmeter and the electrical power connection to the grid. And ownership of any powercarrying of powerconsuming device does not constitute ownership of the power/energy carried or consumed. In the same way the content companies would have us think of hardware. And Microsoft would like you to think of Windows as content in this respect.

Secondly, there is the important question of how this interpretation of information and culture relates copyright to civil right.
The sanctity of physical space (i.e. the right of property) is a very clear and therefore very practical measure of freedom. Actions within the physical space are automatically protected through the protection of the physical space. There are very real and important differences between what is legal in the commons and what is legel in private space. And of course the most important additional freedom is the basic premise of total behavioural and mental freedom.

The content company view of intellectual property is a challenge to this basic notion of freedom. There is a fundamental distinction between the clear cut sanctity of a certain physical space, and the blurry concept of "use".
The act of use itself can be difficult to define, as property debates over "deep-linking" make clear.
In more practical terms, any use of digital data involves numerous acts of copying of the data. Which ones are the ones that are purchased, and which ones were merely technical circumstances of use. The legislation proposed enters this debate at the extreme content-provider biased end of the scale. Ownership of anything other than the intellectual rights to content are of lesser importance than the intellectual ownership.

The difficulty of these questions compromise the notion of single use and use-based pricing. And ultimately - as evidenced by the deep-link discussions - the later behaviour of the property user is also impacted by purchase of intellectual property according to the content sellers. This is a fundamental and important difference between the electrical grid and live performance on one hand, and intellectual property on the other. Intellectual property simply is not perishable, and, as if by magic, it appears when you talk about it.

Interestingly a person with a semiotics backgorund would probably be able to make the concept of "use" seem even more dubious, since the act of comprehension of any text or other intellectual content, is in fact a long running, never ending and many faceted process. In the simplest form, you would skirt an issue such as this, and go with something simple like "hours of direct personal exposure to content via some digital device". That works for simple kinds of use, but not for complicated use. And is should be clear from endless "fair use" discussions that content owners are very aware of the presence of ideas made available in their content in later acts of expression.

A wild farfetched guess would be that as we digitize our personal space more and more, expression will be carried to a greater and greater extent over digital devices, so that the act of thought is actually external, published and visible (witness the weblog phenomenon). In such a world, the notion that reference is use becomes quite oppresive.

Ultimately the concept of free thought and free expression is challenged by these notions of property. It is basically impossible to have free thought and free expression without free reference or at least some freedom of use of intellectual materials.

Somebody's being funny (well, almost) on K5. A guy posing as Steve Ballmer is posting comments on anything - and his comments are always shameless plugs for Microsoft products.

The best and most tasteless one I've found is on the recent Israeli strike against a militant Hamas leader - leading to the death of 15 others: Stevo suggests that if only the Isreali forces communicated with MSN Messenger and Exchange Server, surely the attacking plane would have been informed about the many civilians who died and their deaths could have been avoided.

Man - as previously mentioned - could degrade into biomass for information processing, if the pressure of divided attention cannot be tamed.

Listening to the radio programThis American Life | Give the People What They Want it becomes clear that we are biomass for information - and happily so - as long as were consuming and processing social information. The story is of a home for the Alzheimer plagued, where they stage fake weddings to please the diseased. The weddings are fake. Bride and groom were hired to play bride and groom. It's like Tony n'Tinas wedding without the pretense of any excitement, except that of a social situation in which you participate.

This helps the Alzheimers patients, by placing them in a social situation they can understand and consume mentally, perhaps remembering similar situations from their own life. However, since they are Alzheimer's patients, the memory of the event lasts only a few hours. The home could stage the wedding again the next day, and the attendees would attend as if yesterday had never happened.

I am reminded of a novel by the Danish novelist Svend Aage Madsen called Se Dagens Lys (literally translates to "See the Light of Day") about a man who wakes up each morning in a new world, with a new wife, and new neighbours to happily live though the social gestures of the day, and then wakes up next day with no emotional history, just more social gestures and a new but similar setting (and I am of course also reminded of "Once in a Lifetime", and "Brave New World" and "1984" and every other fictionalization of the modern emotionally disengaged life)

This is great! There's a guy who has actually purchased a sponsored link on Google for keyword Hell
There's a largeish site and a book about The Terrors of Hell being advertised.
Oddly enough - considering the web demographic - the sites found are not for satanist information but religious sites. Biblehelp also bought heaven, oddly enough no porn sites did.

The wired article Deep Link Foes Get Another Win comments on the sad, ridiculous outcome of a lawsuit by Danish newspapers against a link-digest service called Newsbooster. The predictable, but still idiotic, claim of the newspapers is that the forwarding of openly available links to openly available content on their webpages is somehow a violation of their copyright. Nonsense! If the articles were excerpted, so you could read the news without visiting the webpages that would be something, but the idea that you HAVE to arrive at a page through link navigation from a banner page is ridiculous, and the claims made by newspaper spokespersons that they are not trying to limit the availability of deep linking, is of course absurd - since the only thing Newsbooster is guilty of is deep linking.

What's even more ridiculous is that the newspapers could stop the deep linking by changing the way they implement their websites. If they are so intent on only offering links to one page - which of course reduces the value of their service to very little - this is completely possible by serving only dynamic pagereferences, modified on an hourly timescale.

The proper solution for the newspapers is to get with the program and turn their site into true hypertext where every page is a valid and compelling entry point to the entire website. Reworking newspaper sites in this fashion works with the hypertext publishing model instead of against it. Think Amazon. All of their book pages serve as an excellent introduction to further Amazon inventory.

With a proper implementation Newsbooster adds value to the newspapers instead of drawing value.
In fact I think that even with badly made newssites this is true. Peoply simply don't use their back button that much but continue through the newsflow after scanning pages.

Would be interesting to hear someone like Jakob Nielsens comments on this.

This whole humanistic intelligence thing is all fine and dandy - provided the new sensory experience of ever present communication impulses does not mean that we end up in an age of continuous partial attention. Neal Stephensons homepage (the link above) really does not want to be disturbed. His homepage is the longest single statement to the effect "Don't call me I'll call you" I have ever seen.

This entire thing about symbols/ideas/imagery reminds me of a talk I once heard the danish sculptor Hein Heinsen give. To put it briefly, Heinsen's approach to his work means there's a fundamental difference for him between sculpture and painting, in that the sculpture is a question of presence and being, whereas the painting is imagery and idea. As most everybody Heinsen believes there's a just too many ideas going around which of course becomes the grounding for working with sculpture. Of course the reality of it is that the sculpture as being is often a stand-in for some other 'real' being, so in fact merely the idea of being! Whereas the painting is often reduced from being an image to just being the traces of the imagining, so in fact more being. Heinsen claimed in all honesty that he was well aware of this flaw in his logic, and that his answer to the whole thing was to make very few sculptures! We should all have that luxury.

In simpler terms we can follow Stephenson and paraphrase Donald Knuth: Email is a wonderful invention for people who want to be on top of things. I don't want to be on top of things. I want to be on the bottom of things.

The good people at Amazon have the very best online shop (IMHO). Good service, good selection, easy discovery and very nice Encyclopediability (i.e. the property that you always learn something new when using their site by scanning the entry next to the one you were looking for - as when reading a paper encyclopedia). But even the best make mistakes. My latest receipt contains the following staggering numbers

Mainly driven by Germanys massive 8-0 defeat of Saudi Arabia the goals per match average of this years World Cup is still very high. The score for the first four games a staggering 3.5 goals per match. Sunday was a bit more relaxed, but only a bit - ending at 11/4 so we stay above a 3 goal average - nameley 25/8.

So Denmark is below average. But what goals they were! Not having seen Argentina yet, I still think ours is the best game yet.

UPDATE

Having now seen the awesome Argentina-Nigeria match it is now safe to say that Denmarks match is not the best one played at the World Cup. Both teams were very good. Sweden and England are in for some seriously tough opposition. The Nigerian team stayed well organized, had tremenous opportunities of their own, and only lost out because Argentina was - as expected - scary.

In a recent documentary on danish television a spokesperson for the radical fundamentalist Hizb-ut-tahrir movement angrily comments: Why is it that the west is always only told that in our society adulterers are stoned to death when 4 people have witnessed the adultery, and never that no one our society pays taxes? (quote not necessarily accurate - but the words were to this effect).